An underappreciated dynamic of recent Hungarian politics is how several ex-intel officials and generals joined Magyar's team early on. Most professionally minded police, intel and army officers in Hungary just wanted to rejoin the big kids table in NATO and the EU

Has Google Translate always bowdlerised? Asking because I've just tried to translate from a blogpost that contains the line "FIDESZ NEM NYERHET BAZMEG" and the translation "FIDESZ CANNOT WIN ANYMORE" is, erm, definitely not translating that last word

It's not just that Orbán losing inspires hope in other competitive-autocratic countries ruled by right-wing nationalist authoritarians. It's that his loss materially changes things in those other countries, because he's been operating as a headquarters and funding source...

Tonight I'm thinking of the many Hungarians I've met over the years - many of them abroad against their wishes, many of them queer - who haven't stopped fighting, for sixteen years. For most of us, Orbán was an on-and-off nuisance on TV - at best. For them, he was a constant nightmare.

Feels slightly odd to see my timeline have various "let's celebrate by cooking some Hungarian-ish cuisine" but AFAICT no "let's celebrate by getting absolutely hammered on palinka"

This whole thing has made me really sad NGL.

Co-sign (writing from a different country, but on a similar wavelength)

Genuinely wondering if this take could induce Frank Furedi and Tibor Fischer to have coronaries

Long shot but: anyone have a suggestion for where to eat in Lille given we’re getting off a TGV at about 2 and getting the Eurostar later that afternoon. (I am aware of the obvious problem, ie French restaurant opening hours…)

You cannot keep doing this thing where you try to milk a beloved family cow for cash when she is like 90 years old and wants to just stand in the field and moo.

This Reform leaflet from three Gateshead candidates looks like a timelapse of the same person

Just had a non-cheery thought: "Peter Magyar" ="Harold Saxon"?

A couple weeks ago, Nicholas Keung at the Toronto Star reported on how generative AI is being used to assess immigration applications in Canada...and how it's led to refusals because of stuff the AI tool added in, that humans (clearly) failed to check. www.thestar.com/news/canada/...

Over on the elephant site: this re one possible factor behind the homgeneous/homogenized nature of "AI-generated" prose hachyderm.io/@zwarich/116...

I don't give a crap about the axiom of choice, I just want the Hahn-Banach separation theorem (bit of a niche one there, I might have misunderstood the brief)

London hivemind: is there any earthly reason why people should be holding some kind ofprobably-friends-at-a-sports-club piss-up/celebration in the Doric Arch, of all places? (Kind of ruining my "clever plan" to have somewhere to eke out a quiet pint after getting off the train)

"Oh, I'm on a lifetime ban from that Tesco" 🤨🤨🤨

February 2017: Parkin fell through the floorboards and into the foundations of my flat. There had been a loose plank for years, it was under a doormat and I never thought anything of it. One morning I heard a clatter and a yowl, went into the hallway and OH MY GOD PARKIN WHAT HAVE YOU DONE

Kind of annoyed to see (other people) putting forward Michael Caine as an exemplar of category 2 (The Man Who Would Be King? Sleuth? Hannah and Her Sisters? Dirty Rotten Scoundrels? Blood and Wine?)

So this is getting an embarrassing number of likes and reposts for what is actually two comedians (Rebecca Front and Chris Langham) dressed up to look like it’s an interview with George Orwell.

Impressive that the account that posted a docudrama imagined speech of Orwell has disabled replies, disabled quote posts and now blocked people pointing out their error.

Listening to a Columbo podcast and can't decide what I find most jarring: the way Americans pronounce "Peugeot"; or the way the pronounce "herb". (The podcast is perfectly fine, I just keep getting taken out of the moment.)

Then again, TIL www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetai... so I suppose it hasn't been a complete waste

Well, in between all that angst/disgust, literally spent hours today metaphorically hammering+chiselling to produce a negative referee report that is 4 pages long for a paper that is 6 pages long, amid a climate of "just get [LLM of choice] to write it". I feel like the world's pettiest John Henry

"... AND SO IS MICHAEL FISH"

<deep sigh> in an effort to paper over the chasm that today's exchanges have reopened, some musical solace: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzNu...

Find myself wishing for a version of the Total Perspective Vortex, except that instead of showing the occupant how cosmically insignificant they are, it made the occupant question all their beliefs and show them every inconsistency in their moral calculus

Zeroth world problems: constantly vaccilating between annoyance at Scholze As Maths Celebrity versus annoyance at Tao As Maths Celebrity

People call the police on them every time and the police have to explain that drinking a half pint of Guinness while black is actually legal

What is the point of spending your late teens and early 20s trying to Become A Cultured if in middle age your brain insists on responding to knowing allusions to Avignon with www.youtube.com/watch?v=So5U...

The whole "-maxxing" as suffix has an emetic effect on me, but a relatively minor aspect that annoys me disproportionately is the double 'x'. What next: "taxxation"?

Did not know Yaphet was up for Picard. I can only hope he went to the audition insisting he was Italian and talking with his hands. His memory is a blessing.

When I stay at my parents house in Winnipeg, I get to listen to these guys all night. The field outside of their apartment is a major stopover spot for both gulls and geese. #birds

Saw this recently, and didn't want to jinx things, but it did make sense to me www.youtube.com/shorts/Flqpz...

this reminds me that had I heard Joni Mitchell's "River" before I lived in Canada, I would have assumed "a river I could skate away on" was a metaphorical flight of fancy, as opposed to "January"

PREACH. (I should point out for non-academics reading this, who might respond "well that's how anything relying on customer-revenue works, no biggie" - now imagine you literally cannot change anything without someone slapping you down for nom-compliance, "illegitimate" timetabling requests, etc)

We need international students - or more accurately, we need their money - but we also hate and resent them for being human. You couldn’t wish for a better encapsulation of the brutal, self-harming, arse-about-face nature of what passes for immigration policy in the UK

For anyone else who is a fan or follower of "mystery fiction", which nowadays has to get labelled as "crime" and get marketed with death (if not murder): atthevillarose.wordpress.com/2026/04/05/t...

Just 60h ago, the second author (from Sharif U.) of this very nice paper ⬇️ — about which he and I had had an interesting discussion on MO mathoverflow.net/a/479501/17064 — wrote to tell me it had been published. I hope he's well! I can't imagine what it is to do math in those circumstances. 😰

It is interesting because today my tasks included Teaching a lesson on nuclear proliferation Writing notes on multiple regression Teaching a section on logarithms and regression Checking in on administrative tasks Speaking to a global audience Making contingency plans in case the IRGC attacks

You: despite misgivings about trashiness of much output and encouragement of toxic mindset, I will spend hours with LLMs and stay pure Me: despite misgivings about trashiness of much output and encouragement of toxic mindset, I will spend hours watching The Professionals and stay pure

The Dead Zone (movie). Just saying.

Scrolled by this poster and for a sec thought there was a Judas bowling movie.

Boycott's recollections of this tour are incredible, apparently malcolm marshall drove around the island on non match days looking for Geoff just to yell "I'm coming for you!" at him, like he'd be waiting outside the team hotel when the English players left for a team lunch

Simultaneously awed and jealous that I didn't think of this, although I feel it has to be said in a Niles Crane voice

Fatuous numbskull / failed to facilitate feasible tasks in the air / Females beware

Might the smaller sums be for temps? Quite common in the programme and business support teams, probably logistics and catering too. I don’t know how recruitment agencies interact with KTB, maybe they automatically copy across the ads?

This is now reminding me of the time that my aunt’s friends got a magnetic catflap - which could only be opened by the magnet on their cat’s collar - and kept finding their cat stuck to the fridge.