Reposting for the Sunday morning reading crowd with a free-to-read link that isn't behind the Nature paywall! 🔭⚛️🧪👩‍🔬 📖: rdcu.be/floXQ

The first warning arrived on a Tuesday morning, six weeks after consultants advised moving from dependency on six hundred small excel scripts - and nobody at Zenith Ledger Advisory paid much attention. It appeared in the system dashboard between routine audit notifications and a maintenance reminder

This would be a pointless and vindictive move which would shame those who propose it for the rest of their careers.

hi everyone! as your local resident witch and Celtic pantheon pagan *AND* British built heritage historian, please, PLEASE stop leaving lit candles as offerings in Neolithic monuments (cough cough West Kennet Long Barrow)

They’ve gone mad with power if they think they can get people to turn on Dolly.

"In recent weeks, fans have flocked to Taipei’s Longshan Temple to pray to Yue Lao, the Taoist deity of love and marriage. The reason? To ask Yue Lao to use his famous "red thread of fate" to connect them with a concert ticket. " www.instagram.com/p/DZFLSMXBYRi/

🧵 Russia is running daily attacks on Britain, from the seabed to cyberspace. GCHQ recently warned that they are "relentlessly targeting" critical infrastructure and democracy in the UK. A year ago, Ministers promised action. A year on, they have delivered delay. news.sky.com/story/russia...

I didn't have "Husker Du member reviews motorway service stations" on my 2026 bingo card.

This, in case it needs to be said, is the teaching grant for *STEM* subjects, which we have been told are the only subjects worth supporting. Humanities haven't had a block grant in aeons. This decision makes Labour MORE damaging to HE than the Tories.

Former UK technology secretary Peter Kyle agreed to include “more positive language about artificial intelligence” in a speech last year on the advice of Lord Peter Mandelson, co-founder of an advisory firm that worked for OpenAI and Palantir www.ft.com/content/1b3e...

It appears the government won't be satisfied until it has hounded trans people out of society altogether. The Government are choosing every moment and mechanism they can to demonstrate they don't care about their lives. We have to draw the line. Reject the framework.

[ ableism, suicide mention ] coming from the country trying very hard to bring in assisted suicide, this is fucking terrifying less a slippery slope and more a full vertical drop into coercive suicides to cut healthcare costs if it's even considered suicide if you're not considered a person

Henry Nowak’s father’s words outside court, who is probably the person we most need to hear from today.

I would REALLY like to see the cat road collisions petition actually get somewhere this time. Two weeks left to get it over the 100k line so ministers can't just shrug and go "nah that's just for dogs" as they have previously. Please sign and share:

"Elon Musk confirms he got into politics because he does not know how to feel love for other people and give them the freedom to be themselves. Not even his own children. Especially not his own children." #FixedItForYou

Hilarious and deeply insightful writing by @brianphillips.lol.

They're changing the rules for how stocks get listed in the index in order to get SpaceX in there as soon as it IPOs. Large numbers of investment vehicles are required to hold stock in all of the companies in the index. By getting into the index, he's forcing them to buy the stock he's selling.

Congratulations to Ian Sample, science editor at The Guardian, for writing the lede of the year.

When the father of a murdered son makes a public statement saying "we do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension", then I believe it's incumbent on any news outlet reporting on Farage's comments to ensure people know he has chosen to disregard the family's wishes.

Farage’s demand for “pure cold rage” isn’t a dog whistle, it’s a klaxon.

The green economy, which is worth more than £100bn a year, benefits all of the UK. 1.1m jobs depend on it, paying above-average wages. Who says so? @greenparty.org.uk? That head-in-the-clouds loony lefty @zackpolanski.bsky.social? Nope. It's only *the CBI*! 👍 www.theguardian.com/environment/...

The U.S. government handed a 3-year-old to an abuser to torture him to death, and then his mother was allotted one hour for his funeral.

Farage is obviously trying to stoke up race riots and exploiting a man’s murder to achieve that. Henry Nowak’s dad said outside court that he does not “want the murder used to create further hatred, division or tension. This is not about racism this is a case about murder." Farage doesn’t care.

Summer Vintage Market in Dulwich, south London, on Sunday 7th June Vintage stalls outdoors and inside with everything from furniture to fashion, beer stall, street food, and a live jazz band! 10.30-5.00pm Dulwich Picture Gallery, SE21 7AD Read more at solastcenturyfair.co.uk

I wrote a whole post about the best teacher I ever had: Keith Johnson, from the sixth grade. whatever.scalzi.com/2018/01/29/m...

“Introducing the panel, Cadwalladr said: ‘I think this might be a Hay first, in which we have an author in a hostage situation. Blink once if you can hear us, Sarah, twice if [Mark] Zuckerberg is an asshole.’”

The hateful, xenophobic Home Office is at it again, this time targetting children as young as 5. Such a bad look for @labouruk.bsky.social. RefUK policies will lose you votes, not gain them. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

‘Hold your nerve and trust nature’: birds, bats and butterflies rebound at Somerset rewilding farm

I mean. I dedicated a whole book to my 3 decades long grudge...

Mandelson, (then) FCDO perm sec Olly Robbins and (then) Number 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney all ended up personally involved in trying to get a ministerial red box as a gift for Donald Trump. "This is like something out of Thick of it," Mandelson complained.

Wes Streeting seems to be coming out in favour of a £120m tax break for James Dyson. As Expurgated Dawn Foster observed, he has always been a Tory. (Source for £120m figure: www.ft.com/content/e013...).

Werewolf (also known as Mafia) is a game created by sociology student Dimitry Davidoff in 1986. It isn't just about strategy- it shows how a small, informed minority can outsmart the uninformed majority, highlighting the power of hidden information Original post

A leaked letter signed by 400 female writers has criticised the corporation for what it calls the ‘silencing of women’s voices’ in women’s stories for commissioning a male writer for a drama about the Met police and the Sarah Everard murder. Read it in full here: www.thenerve.news/p/female-scr...

Justin Webb is a loathsome bigot, but I suppose we can thank him for getting a confirmation from the new Health Secretary James Murray that he, too, is a loathsome bigot. (Webb asked Murray if he believed trans women are women. Murray said he no longer believes that.)

thinking about this a lot today

Oxford is getting (another!) new bookshop. Bad Girl Books will open at 29 Walton Street, Jericho, next month as a romantasy (romance+fantasy) bookshop and gift store. Proprietor Starlin Marot says she wants it to be “a place where people can make like-minded friends in a fun, judgement-free space”.

Yesterday I witnessed something extraordinary: the author Sarah Wynn-Williams sitting silent on a stage at @hayfestival.bsky.social. And she got a standing ovation. I hope the attempt to censor her backfires magnificently. I have just ordered her book. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Yes. Using a computer now feels like this at all times.

H/T to @diamondgeezer.bsky.social for linking to this one this morning, a superb London Underground "guess the tube station!" game, which i've just spent the last hour playing ... !! dailymetro.live/london

One of the more misogynistic takes currently trending in the AI policy space is "women use less AI than men because they have less tech literacy" Ok but have you considered that women use less AI than men because we have more tech literacy?

If you're a billionaire people will just sit there and listen to your mad claptrap. "Antichrist, you say? How interesting Señor Thiel. Tell us more." Thus your claptrap gets madder. A bit like Roman emperors, billionaires should be followed around by a bloke from the pub going "You what, mate?"

Sick of the relentless adult content I see on Bluesky: back pain, interest rates, tax brackets, that noise you make when you stand-up sometimes.

Nicola’s only crime was to love too much. And to not notice the Jaguar on the drive

"Trump signed a sweeping executive order in March that, in part, ordered the Postal Service to only send mail ballots to voters on lists created and controlled by the federal government." Amazing how you can just proceed as tho the Constitution just ... wasn't written

You know what we don't talk enough about? Queen & Annie Lennox/David Bowie rehearsing 'Under Pressure' in 1992. So much going on! Everyone's clothes, Bowie with a lit cig throughout, where Annie PROPER GOES FOR IT, George Michael singing along in the background. The amazing vocals. Yes, please!

The way these "AI checkers" work is very, very simple. It feeds part of the text into an LLM. If the LLM predicts, correctly, the missing text, it scores that as proof the LLM produced the text. And LLM's literally stole *every fucking book and forum post ever fucking written* to train on.

Meowie Antoinette

Painting Zucks megayacht on Lake Union last night 🔥

Hundreds chanting, "FUCK AI!" "Hundreds of people marched through downtown Vancouver over the weekend to protest a proposed cluster of AI data centers backed by Telus, voicing concerns about water use, electricity demand, and what that could mean for local communities." www.msn.com/en-us/money/...