I am enjoying Roost, a very silly app where messages are sent at the speed of birds. Follow this link and send me a message by owl, chaffinch, or albatross! roostsocial.app/invite/VUSJAS

Today is ‘National Picky Bits Day’ so enjoy this extended rant on why it’s time for Britain to grow up.

The way I've gotten this across in talks to US audiences is to explain that by the time the Battle of Gettysburg was fought... ...the London Underground had already been open for six months.

Reading the news is the new smoking www.experimental-history.com/p/reading-th...

genuinely think a key element of the current British-American fighting is that Americans don’t understand that complaining is the British national sport

Haha, nice one @privateeyenews.bsky.social !

It has probably, almost certainly, happened, whether or not this was indeed the first time, no one knows www.newscientist.com/article/2529...

tbf i never thought that idea had legs

5-HOUR FREE TRIAL (Source.)

We need to think deeper: why is this unacceptable for a 17 year old but acceptable for an 18 year old - or a 57 year old? Age controls are not the real problem.

the rest of the crew will be telephone sanitizers and marketing execs.

You know who isn't getting radicalized? Guys who do ships in a bottle. Embrace model-building and avoid the pitfalls of right-wing extremism

Available now for download globally: Misha and guests discuss Cybernetics www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

The Internet is God vm.tiktok.com/ZNRWFexJA/

Can't wait for the 2028 laser tag renaissance!

There is no safe age to be exposed to unending footage of atrocities, pro-anorexia content, or images of child sexual abuse:

Transmission #4760 from NROL-82 (UMBRA) 1. Infernal Black Hole of Spores 2. Crumbling Cottage of Bodily Remains 3. Woke Mind Virus Compute Facility

I have found myself to be a master at everything I turn my hand to, with the singular exception of correctly appraising my competency levels.

Dispatch #2277 from QUASAR (UMBRA) 1. Haunted Pile of Non-Fungible Tokens 2. A Cousin

Britain was perhaps the leading nation in maintaining a consistent principled line on Ukraine. We just threw that reputation away.

Ok I've designed an LLM prompt to make Google AI just give you a list of links. It's longer than you might think because it kept ignoring the instructions. This is efficient. This is The Future™

Johnny Cash makes a couple of cameos in my new book, an alternative history of science. Maybe he is Uatu, the Watcher. open.substack.com/pub/arutherf...

The Wikipedia graphic version of the Columbian Exchange is somehow hilarious. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbi...

The late and much missed Ross Anderson famously wrote "The idea that complex social problems are amenable to cheap technical solutions is the siren song of the software salesman and has lured many a gullible government department on to the rocks." Today I can also hear him grumbling "oh FFS."

It is, today, the 55th anniversary of that gift to satire James Arkell, whose solicitors wrote to Private Eye on this day in 1971, prompting everyone’s favourite reply. You may know the story, but I put it to you that you cannot hear it enough. We begin with that initial letter... 🧵

Morning

ISOC LIVE summary of a new paper from David Huberman at ICANN, 'ICANN and the IETF' - on the unsung toilers who keep the Internet interoperable via identifiers, protocols, and IANA functions that bridge them. isoclive.substack.com/p/icann-and-... @ietf.org #ICANN #IANA #IETF

FOR ASTETIC REASONS

Hungarians celebrated the landslide defeat of Orban by singing "We Are the Champions" out in the streets

This Donnie Darko sequel SUCKS.

right now the astronauts are calling houston because the computer on the spaceship is running two instances of microsoft outlook and they can't figure out why. nasa is about to remote into the computer

I'm a little surprised that the Internet Protocol Police have only just been formed. honestly thought they already existed 🤷‍♂️ www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9948....

Security Vulnerabilities in DNS over HTTPS (DoH) - mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dns...

This is quite something from Singapore's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vivian Balakrishnan, in an interview with Reuters. The end of the post-war order, diagnosed in technocratic language. www.mfa.gov.sg/newsroom/pre...

Great example of how Oxford / Harvard comma can be useful!

Neal Stephenson, who coined the term ‘metaverse’, says head-mounted VR hardware will never happen

Ok, this is cool.

20 years ago today.

So... the actual story reported here is that the administration set up a dedicated task force to document EU censorship and THEY COULD NOT FIND ANY. Not that you'd know that from the headline. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

It’s just so fucking typical that Zuckerberg’s big moonshot idea that he burned $80 billion on was a bigger, better Second Life

Web3 “domains” are dead The web3 domain experiment was a failure. This week, Unstoppable Domains CEO Matthew Gould posted on X about the company's transition to traditional domain names. He explained that the company's website is focusing more on "web2 domains" because web3 names aren't panning…

Wow. Foraminifera! ROV pilots paused and carefully zoomed in to collect footage of these single-celled microorganisms, or protists, at 843 m during the #OBVI #LivingBioreactors expedition w/ @schmidtsciences.bsky.social offshore of Argentina. Read the full caption: youtube.com/shorts/Yv_ud...

Website: linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/stone-... Substack: open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

This is entertaining. We are sending someone interesting to Eurovision with an actually fun track. A small ray of sunshine.

This perfectly illustrates my point that the British tabloids are aiming at a US audience. There like 5 people in the UK who think about this. But it is huge among US evangelicals. British politicians need to ignore UK tabloids, as UK tabloids are talking to an audience in the US for clicks.

The Underbar (the #perl podcast) has an interview with Olaf Kolkman about Perl and DNS and other things pca.st/episode/042e... #dns #dnssec #ietf #icann

NEW The death of the Firm The arrest of Andrew may not show the end of the monarchy, but it may show the end of a certain model of monarchy By me at @prospectmagazine.co.uk www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/th...

love a bit of continvouclous morging