Is AI making job recruitment less meritocratic? We're getting some v interesting research studies on this question now, and the news is... not good. @jburnmurdoch.ft.com & I dive in, in the latest edition of our newsletter The AI Shift www.ft.com/content/e5b7...

The capacity of this government to bollox things up is genuinely staggering. I am getting really strong 'made it up in desperation in the back of a taxi' vibes off this (hat tip to @aiannucci.bsky.social).

This is so completely awful. We're at risk of disappearing into our own insularity.

If you think that “the slow vanishing of employee benefits” is a better trade politically than “the other lot saying you broke your promise on income tax”, you are out of your tree: www.ft.com/content/1160...

Oh good. A sensible intervention onto the madness with graphs in. I love a good graph.

Crisis at the Critic Sketchcasting Corporation!

Incredible that Robbie Gibb - most influential person on BBC board by many accounts and from journalists I speak in BBC - was involved in setting up GB News. GB News of course has breached Ofcom rules on *multiple* occasions - no sign of resignations though www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Listening to the news on today's BBC scalps is like listening to a parallel universe. Trump's speeches at the moment are unhinged, rambling. Newscasters are constantly editing them to make them make sense. If we're going to go to reporting what Trump actually says now, then great. Ppl will see...

Gen AI is a parasite that in the end will kill its host. The techbros know this, so there are two possibilities: they want to kill the host, or they don't care if it dies.

This sounds a lot like industrial scale blackmail.

Note the ‘British soil’ bit. My uni has plans to open a campus in China. The VC scoffed at me when I expressed concern that staff and students wouldn’t be able to speak freely, and that - as he said - the curriculum would be censored. It’s the price of doing business.

Vital piece of investigative reporting from Sky. They've uncovered the X algorithm which feeds users extremist right wing material from the moment they join the site. It is a far-right radicalisation engine, by design. news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

Pretty extraordinary story here www-bbc-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.bbc....

Let's just take a moment to reflect on the self-sacrifice and hope this person embodies - not the evil, hateful monsters thirsting for violence.

I've been getting back into the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series after many years, and the most relatable part is how everyday objects like doors and elevators have been imbued with artificial intelligence and it just makes them obnoxious and frustrating to use and everyone hates it.

'Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are worse at retrieving accurate information and reasoning when trained on large amounts of low-quality content, particularly if the content is popular on social media1, finds a preprint posted on arXiv on 15 October.' 1/2

All this endless testing does is make kids hate education. A friend told me recently that her daughter came home distressed because the teacher shouted at the class that they were one of the worst she'd taught and were going to screw up their sats. How does this help anyone?

Final reminder for National Trust Members to vote

Happy #Halloween! A wonderful 2nd century AD Roman mosaic found near Antioch, Turkey showing a skeleton, cup of wine in hand, reclining on the floor of a dining room in a house reminding guests to enjoy life: ‘ευφρόσυνος’

There is a legal case for King Charles III to resume his status as monarch of the Americas—but it is strewn with obstacles

Ministry of Wolves sadly overlooked here as a scary soundtrack - music from a Brothers Grimm production by Alexander Hacke, Mick Harvey, Daniella Di Picciotto and Paul Wallfish. When we saw them in Bristol a woman yelled out 'you're scary, and I've seen shit!' www.theguardian.com/music/2025/o...

Please join us on 22 November to discuss Women and Knowledge. We cannot wait to listen to and engage with all presentations 😁 This event is free to attend, but prior registration is required through this link: us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi... Thank you! We look forward to seeing you there!

This is actually a hell of a kick in the arse in royalspeak. Can't help but think, though, about how this sits with the allegations about Charles' favourite uncle widely reported and discussed in Ireland that somehow never quite land in the UK.

Indeed...

These terrifying bats are looking forward to #Halloween 🦇🦇🦇😱 Bodl. Library MS. Ashmole 304; 13th century; England, St. Albans; f.47v @bodleian.ox.ac.uk

What is it with the Techbros and Tolkien?

Another fun booking experience with the University's chosen travel management system, which seems unable to confirm, even given 20 days, whether my booking includes breakfast. Apparently this is more efficient than us booking stuff ourselves.

We have zero plans to put AI in LibreOffice, of course. Our focus is privacy and letting you control your data. Some users want AI features and they can get them via optional extensions made by the community – but we won't put it in the app itself.

UK wind power benefits and costs 2010-2023 : Lower energy bills through avoided gas: £14.2bn Avoided infra & new gas generation: £133.3bn Subsidies paid to wind power: - £43.2bn Overall benefit to UK economy **£104bn** Don't believe the wind power haters www.theguardian.com/environment/...

oh my GODDDDDDDDDDD (apologies for screenshotting the hellsite, which I no longer use; I saw the link in CNN's Reliable Sources newsletter)

In Southampton yesterday there was a national call (via Turning Point, Tommy Robinson, etc) for an anti-migrant rally. Very happy that even at short notice that march was outnumbered by about 50%.

Brava @cathamclarke.bsky.social ! Great listening on 6 Music this morning on A History of England in 25 Poems! We enjoyed Half Man Half Biscuit, and I have had to explain the rest of the Wife of Bath's Tale to Tim, following that cliffhanger!

Yes, very much looking forward to this.

This is really important. Policy driven research which then influences policy risks falling into a blinkered feedback loop.

Wrote in similar terms to our equalities lead and union on day one after the judgement. It was bloody obvious that it was unimplementable with no connection to the real world. That's a real world where the women's changing rooms at my spa regularly have a sign on the door saying 'a male cleaner...

Plaid won - great! But why then am I listening to another effing Reform interview on R4 Today? Well, not listening now, coz I turned it off.

Bloody hell!

I really quite like UK planning laws.

Michael Gove personally intervened to ensure that a Conservative donor's firm was awarded a multimillion pound covid contract. Private correspondence reveals that Ciga Healthcare’s Brexit-supporting owner had pushed Gove to “take control” of the process. The contract was awarded just days later

You may have heard about UK ministers' plan to double to 10 years the time needed to reached settled status in the UK. But did you realise that it threatened access to pensions for the 180,000 people who came from Hong Kong on the UK government's visa scheme? My dispatch: www.ft.com/content/8b91...

This is terrifying. It's your colleagues and your neighbours, if not you. What has happened to this country?

Modern conservatism now advocating the biggest assault on *the family* in our entire history. Head-spinning stuff.

They're going to deport the parents (or one parent) of children born here, who may be UK citizens? What about the children? Are they supposed to go with the parents or into our notorious care system?

To be clear: deportations to increase cultural homogeneity is the text book definition of ethnic cleansing. Demands that come even close to this are so far outside any democratic norm and the rule of law. What has happened to a country when this is not condemned in the strongest possible terms?

I am so hacked off with every piece of tech this AM trying to chuck Gen AI summaries at me. Just to mess with the system I said 'yes' in the end to Acrobat's offer to present me key highlights from a complex paper on Christine de Pizan. Result, after a longish wait?

This shouldn't be a surprise if you've ever tried to interact with firms with Gen AI in their workflows. eBay recently tried to move to Gen AI estimating postage by default but it was so wrong and caused such protest that they quickly reversed. Our insurance company tried to introduce a bot...

"But when the team looked at the employees’ actual work output, they found that the developers had completed tasks 20% slower when using AI than when working without it. Researchers were stunned. “No one expected that outcome. We didn’t even really consider a slowdown as a possibility.” 🎁link

So I realize I’ve reposted this all day, but I cannot understate the scale of this story. If Anthropic is spending this much on Google Cloud - or even 25% - the costs of running their business are never coming down. It’s a huge scoop, and the first real discussion of the true costs of AI anywhere.

So much this! And they stick the bar over the bit you need to hit to not use the AI tool, seemingly in order to make it impossible to get out!

One of the Banksy books has a bit about the value of working in plain sight. Turn up in boiler suits with high Vis, cherry pickers, ladders and no one will question you.