‘We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand’ Blog on Anthropic’s site www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

‘Our findings suggest that Al-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation - particularly in safety-critical domains.’ (HT @williamcb.bsky.social)

‘Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition… We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average.’ arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245

And one for the fountain pens crew: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Nibs.

“Well, we have to prepare for a future where we have no local news services at all. And no drama or comedy made for national markets. That’s just what’s going to happen.” Why? God, I hate the supine surrender of it all.

At policy and politics events in London too often a latent francophobia shines through that British political and intellectual elites no longer have the luxury to afford

I wonder if our university leadership team are grateful that we didn’t vote for their preferred candidate for Chancellor in 2015, Peter Mandelson, and elected Lemn Sissay instead.

An app where you ID books you've read based on how important they are to you called Maslow's Hierarchy of Reads

There's lots of reasons to dislike AI, but one in particular for me is how it acts as an enabler for our cultural inability to just let things go. We can finish this unfinished film! We can resurrect dead actors in perpetuity! AI chats with our deceased relatives!

Just learned that Vimeo has been bought by some purveyor of AI rubbish, so I guess I'm looking for another place to put video. Le sigh. Anyone got any suggestions as to a good place to put really obscure niche visualisations?

'to treat peer review as a throughput problem is to misunderstand what is at stake. Review is not simply a production stage in the research pipeline; it is one of the few remaining spaces where the scientific community talks to itself.' 1/3

Popcorn at the ready: the UKGov Science, Innovation & Technology Committee is about to quiz Sir Ian Chapman about UKRI’s new strategic objectives. Will they ask him about the devastating cuts planned for UK astronomy? Let's hope so. 🔭🧪 📺 Watch live from 9:30am: parliamentlive.tv/event/index/...

Three days until kick-off - you can still ghost in and grab those late tickets to join us this weekend... www.ticketsource.co.uk/ukghoststory... #ghost #ghosts #ghoststory #ghoststories #fiction #writing #writers #authors #gothic #spooky #supernatural

Paris prosecutors raid the offices of Elon Musk's X. www.reuters.com/world/europe...

the problem with this newfound “bursary” argument aired in the Times is this: twhen we first heard about these payments in September a person close to Mandelson said it couldn’t possibly be the case and, er, threatened to sue us

Thanks - if anyone wants an overview of what we have we have a guide to the types of maps you can find here - www.history.ac.uk/map-collecti...

Catching an Uber, #Bridgerton style? This remarkable 1783 pocket #map of #London, in the collection of @ihrlibrary.bsky.social, shows the Hackney Coach fare between key destinations in the city. A great guide to getting around - and avoiding getting ripped off! More info in AltText.

they should make a movie series about how it’s irresponsible to use technology to mess with the natural order of things for profit

Kendall said, “If we can show that AI helps young people learn, supports local businesses to be more productive, and improves public services[...]“ Apropos of nothing in particular, I found myself wondering whether Kendall has any IRL work experience in tech. Seems not.

Take me down to the Parallax city where the far moves slow and the near moves quickly

know this is not something that could happen either in general or at least in the next few years but I would genuinely love it if a journalist could sit down with some of the powerful people who interacted with Epstein - even anonymously - so they could explain what they got out of the relationship

This is actually very interesting because that’s what people get wrong about the Middle Ages as well. Simply put: you might know how to build aqueducts from self healing concrete but you might lose the need *and* capability to do so. Three separate things. Many misunderstand how societies adapt. 1/

Hi everyone, I'm organising a conference in Leuven, 4-5 June, and you're all invited*! It's called 'Performing evil: the mediation and display of diabolic spectres 1700-2000' and here is the call for papers (get in touch if you'd like a pdf!). Please share widely! *to submit an abstract before 21/3

The @societyofauthors.bsky.social and other creatives orgs have launched a new report showing the calamitous impact of generative AI on the creative sector. It's doing so much damage. #JusticeForCreators societyofauthors.org/2026/01/30/b...

in *2018*

Not everybody was kung fu fighting. I saw a little thumb wrestling, too.

I found this post pretty interesting. The "gen ai as slot machine" analogy is used quite often and this post discusses that idea - calls the state of concentration engendered "dark flow" or "junk flow", and refers to "a misguided feeling of agency". www.fast.ai/posts/2026-0...

EVERY TIME YOU READ A BOOK, A TECH BILLIONAIRE CRIES

i was actually shocked to see the numbers on new research from Global Energy Monitor on new gas projects in the US: nearly 100 gigawatts of power—enough to power tens of millions of homes—are currently in development explicitly to power data centers. At the end of 2023 that number was 4 gigawatts

As a side note, it’s funny to see so many of these emails with thirsty academics repeatedly enact Marx’s bit in the 1844 Manuscripts about the power of money. “Oh Mr Epstein, your house in New York is enormous and, unrelatedly, your questions at dinner were so intelligent, so insightful, so deep.”

this one seems pretty universal

tag yourself i’m I AM MANOEUVRING WITH DIFFICULTY

I wonder if people who are smarter than this kind of thing than me have written anything about the digitial 'turn' (whatever we're there) in humanities and its fragility re: the British Library hack? @calthalas.bsky.social and/or @etreharne.bsky.social, I'm thinking here?

It always makes me laugh, because my small experiences of working with big firms to explain storytelling were so universally bizarre. They really don't want to be told that the nuance is a factor...

In which we learn what happens when you combine the effectiveness of online learning with the efficiency of UK government, the academic rigour of management consultancy, and the fundamental honesty of purpose of ChatGPT.

How? How do you double-check the accuracy, if you're not already an expert? Ask a different GenAI? Or do you, you know... Have to go and do the research you would have done anyway, pre-AI? Because I'm buggered if I can think of how you do that in a way where the GenAI saved you time.

7. THE RURAL ART SCENE

"the strip-mining of all of humanity’s expression" is quite the phrase

I am reminded of that YouGov survey in which 12% of men vs 3% of women claimed to believe that they could win a point in a tennis match against Serena Williams.

As an ex e-learning developer, I can confidently say this will be a terrible learning experience. I cannot wait to rip it to shreds. Here's what the Free AI Training will look like 🧵 1/

Just logged into Instagram to be presented with an option to pay and go ad free, or to keep it free and Meta can use my information for ads. Logged into Facebook, exactly the same message. How is it fair that I have to pay for the right to say whether people can use my information?!

Not content with flogging off our data for years, Meta is now going down the blackmail route which is entirely in keeping with the "enshittification" of the Internet Now their game is pay up or be bombarded by ads The article below best describes the practices www.theguardian.com/science/2024...

Pulp scholarship is political.

*fully restores your HP as you scroll past*

I and many others predicted this long ago. VPNs now headed for UK age gating. Amendment 94a is also massive, given its potential scope. reclaimthenet.org/uk-house-of-...

TD Cowen had a data center themed analyst letter today that said that Oracle may lay off 20-30,000 people or sell Cerner to keep up with the debt on the data centers it’s building for OpenAI.

Reform is basically a suburban petrol station's DVD bin of Tory politicians.