This is such a wonderful thing to do www.bbc.com/news/article...

Always good to have your response to a consultation immediately ready to go. Suggests you've definitely engaged with the results of the consultation and that the entire thing wasn't a waste of time.

Revisiting Walter Benjamin's 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘬 𝘰𝘧 𝘈𝘳𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘔𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘙𝘦𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 (1936) and I wonder what he would make of generative AI. His essay opens with this prophetic quote by Paul Valéry

I have filled this out, and with a heavy heart I have to say it is clear the government thinks it can magic away the problem of online harms - 80% of the questions are centred on mythical age verification technology that does not exist.

The UK Government consultation on "Growing up in the online world" closes TODAY: www.gov.uk/government/c... This is a difficult and important question for children, families, policymakers, platforms and wider society. Please engage!

Teen access to chatbots (esp. ones offering adult content) is a serious issue, so not sure why this article 1) blames young boys for services that someone else built and handed to them, or 2) illustrated the article with Netscape Navigator era artwork?? www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05...

Mother of three? Come on BBC, do you do this for astronauts who are fathers?

Can elder millennials help me? I distinctly remember a brief controversy where anything put into the search bar of custom printshop Zazzle was automatically displayed on a t-shirt, effectively creating the product on the fly. Naturally the store was immediately filled with every crude and racist

very funny to me that the only permitted use case of AI is the specific thing it does very badly. (just use the right tool, like LexisNexis!!)

TIL that you can silk-screen print solar panels like you would a t shirt. this feels wrong somehow

is Dune good or did a lot of men just read it when they were 16?

If you enjoy my science cartoons and are a Comics industry professional, you can vote for my latest book 'Physics for Cats' (amongst many other great books!) in the Eisner Awards: www.comic-con.org/awards/eisner-awards/

Greenpeace's campaign against vitamin A-enriched Golden Rice has likely done a huge amount of harm to children. It was evil, even. Let's hope they don't succeed in blocking the growth of this high iron and zinc rice...

My guess? Endemic problem of overstretched journalists, no time, plausible/popular messaging in an easy-report format, opportunity for audience buzz. Years ago we tried up skilling journalists. While many appreciated knowing how to appraise research, the push to churn out content overrode this.

Impossible not to be reminded of Alvin Lucier probing the noise added by a medium by turning the signal to zero

in the same way scam emails use broken English to filter for the most gullible marks, you have to realise that dressing up like a dorky villain in a mid-budget 90s videogame is essential for attracting the stupidest people in the country

This is neat: by cutting notches in a metal washer, researchers created a tiny cymbal that resonates at a unique ultrasonic frequency detectable by smartphone, making a low-cost passive tag dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10....

in terms of generating seed funding, Colossal's most successful products seem to be press releases ⬇

Hard not to feel like the web is dead. though I guess the AI still needs something to pillage

There are still a few places left. We can do invoicing for corporate individuals and teams. Register at events.changeist.com

my latest obsession are these ants, which can locate any food I put down in minutes. They “smell” the food, but not like me - they don’t breathe it in, can’t sniff deep some nice scent, or hold their breath against bad odours. They must experience it like I do sound, ever-present, the good and bad

this is fun, but I don't know why you wouldn't simply apply an eye drop with ATP/NADH, rather than the machinery to make it? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Absolutely fascinating article by @jjaron.bsky.social in this week's @newscientist.com I rarely read cover to cover, but I always read something which is brilliant www.newscientist.com/article/2525...

who on here is good on linguistics and AI (specifically, word embeddings, mapping semantics in tensors)?

wild scenes

When I was young, in the darkest skies, I might see a satellite if I stared at the sky for hours. Last weekend I spotted half a dozen in the space of a few minutes, in relative bright skies.

I think this is pretty much accurate. This place is a retirement home for people who don't do video davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/bluesky-is...

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

I think that focusing on AI’s inaccuracies in recalling facts misses some of the most interesting shifts in information architecture since … Google? indexing? and it’s weird that this seems to be going by uncommented 1/n

I would like to talk to people who have been actively working to reduce screen time/reliance on tech, whether that's by switching to a flip phone or using something that helps you limit screen time etc -- [email protected]

Great investigation by @olifranklinwallis.bsky.social into the murky world of testosterone therapy. All the classic wellness scam elements: vague symptoms, anecdotal benefits, anxieties over identity, and a medical-business complex playing fast & loose with facts www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

I know this is a conclusion with a kernel of truth, but it sends all my polisci red alert flashing: - 2026 Reform vote at >50% of previous non-voters has no face validity, especially if inferred uniquely from aggregate data - how is the reference point 2024, when these places last voted in 2021-2

This chart offers compelling narratives but comes with important caveats (modelled aggregate data, several key assumptions, low turnout in 2024, local v national elections & author warns firm conclusions aren’t possible). oskanberg.github.io/2026-voter-f...

related:

I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I feel you can't inject falsehoods into the scientific corpus and blame AI for retrieving these, any more you can blame inkjet technology if you print them out. Bixonimania is warning against pre-print servers, if anything

TIL China controls 97% of wafer production for solar PV. They don’t just have a lot of solar power, they own solar power, sort of how the Gulf states own oil

This is a funny story because all awards are fake and made up (except the ones with cash prizes, those are real) www.bbc.com/news/article...

This is all so desperately sad, so many tragedies behind a single headline. The everyday horrors of war www.bbc.com/news/article...

SLF Older Writers Grant: $1000 to support non-professional authors of speculative fiction aged 50 and over: speculativeliterature.org/grants-3/slf...

While getting robots to do dirty dangerous work is a good thing, hard not to wonder if the real issue here is the naked contempt for human workers. www.bbc.com/news/article...

the immortal tweet, endlessly metastasising

"the cost of being alive" Powerful reporting, as always, from Daniel.

If we are banning cell phones for kids we need to be talking about banning chatbots for boomers www.persuasion.community/p/my-chatgpt...

The Cursed Ratio

Lately I find myself returning to this speech; especially: "Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝗰𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘄𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀" www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY...

I came here in 1975. I'm a Nobel Prize-winning scientist born in Germany during WWII, came here in 1975 thinking there was no way fascism could take hold in this country. I was wrong. I don't not want to be book-ended by two fascist regimes. We will stand up and set things right.

This is half the article I’ve wanted to write for a while - there’s something even more interesting underneath it, in how men (all preppers seem to be men) are taught to pursue the *capacity* to help others, but not to actually practice helping others www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/o...

Incredible Sights: Top 10 Real Ghosts Caught on Camera You Won’t Believe Your Eyes (credit Doug Mills/NYT)

it used to take me hours to write janky code for some macro that crashed every time I ran it, but thanks to AI, I can achieve this in minutes, truly a great advance

I’ve been hearing so much anger and disappointment from frontline workers about the BBC investigation into fraudulent asylum claims. One of the most damning responses has come from one of the experts they interviewed, solicitor Ana Gonzalez. It’s really worth reading her response in full: