I guess the question is whether the political capital exists to do this *while* also massively expanding European militaries as, unfortunately, both need to happen and both need to happen very quickly

It is odd that no one seems to be catching on but I wonder how much of that, at least among my more well-informed friends, is a personal choice to just not think about it? I’ve been worried since the strait closed but there’s nothing at all I can do about it and it’s outside of my area of expertise

When you finally wonder if maybe you’ve contributed to a moral panic that has led to the most extreme assault on minority rights since Jim Crow

Give me Battlefleet Gothic or give me death! So many memories of shouting “all ahead full”, “lock on target” and “come to new heading” at my little imperial ships (before watching them get obliterated by chaos long range guns)

Thompson's hematologist at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Robert A. Brodsky, published a study revealing that the research now has an overall 94% disease-free survival rate. "[A cure is now] available to the majority, almost the entirety, of sickle cell patients.” #GoodNews #BlackSky 🌱

Day of the triffids at around 11 years old - ended up skipping to the end to try and escape the apocalypse to discover that the apocalypse continues and then couldn’t read anymore

Oh nice they’re removing Copilot from Notepad, maybe they’ll also stop adding vulnerabilities to massively basic software too blogs.windows.com/windows-insi...

"my foolproof plan to put the absolute worst people in charge of everything has backfired on me, what nefarious foreign agent has undermined me?" C'mon.

Utterly the wrong call. Step by step, this embroils us in an immoral, illegal, illogical war.

Whatever yarn the White House has spun re opening of the Straits of Hormuz, it better be grounded in reality or we have just been sucked further in and contributed to further escalation. Given nothing they've said so far has born any relationship to reality, the odds aren't great.

While I'm not an abyss supporter and concede its endless void of hunger threatens to devour all hope, as a concerned centrist I've chosen to focus on policing the tone of abyss critics on social media.

As far as I can tell the US & Israel are publicly ruminating on reopening the Strait as their victory condition for this war. But since it was open before the war, in fact only closed because of the war, it would be huge expense and life lost to do a thing that they could just achieve by ending it?

You see stuff like this a lot from well-meaning American commentators and like...yes, it is important to recognise that a country's government is not necessarily reflective of its people. But in terms of how the rest of the world has to deal with the US, I'm sorry, your government is relevant.

What we are witnessing here is an attack on what it is to be British: free to worship, free to speak, free to gather. We are not going to surrender everything that was built over centuries and defended in two World Wars. The British people will not put up with this - simple as.

I lose most of Friday as NowTV is having an outage with their broadband service and, as the copper wires in my flat are terrible I look into three broadband as a replacement to find they now offer it and it’s half the price. Excellent, I make the switch. Three is having an outage today. I am cursed

The Labour party is once more locked in a battle with its arch nemesis, the Labour party.

STICK IT ON A FIVE POUND NOTE

shot

One of the advantages of needing regular cold chain related drugs to survive is that i don’t need to put any thought into what I’d do in the event of an apocalypse

*waves in what about the rest of us scientists who are not in AI or quantum computing*

Siri, what’s the most Canadian disaster to have ever occurred? No, that’s too Canadian

Personally, my favorite allied-country expression of naval non-commitment is “intensively looking”. What’s yours?

The rule for LLMs: Only use them in places where correctness doesn't matter or where the output can be checked for correctness automatically. Having humans check MOSTLY right automated systems is the uncanny valley of automation that is a recipe for disaster.

Obviously we all knew (on here anyway) this war was a bad idea but the level of fuck-up is off the scale. The incompetence is like nothing I've seen before.

A lot of the arguments against ‘40K invoke something similar (and in a world with fascists in power I am more sympathetic to this argument than previously. I still would prefer ‘40K is left to be ‘40K - if you think the “cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable” is good actually, that’s on you)

I’ve just heard an advert for “selling unwanted gold” on a podcast. Last time I remember similar ads was back in 2008/2009 (and a Mitchell and Wevb sketch youtu.be/X_5ymAraY1o?...). If I remember correctly something bad was happening to the global economy then? Probably nothing.

In the eternal struggle between myself and the natural world the natural world continues its unbeaten run

Ok, so HMG has been claiming that we’ve got lots of (maybe fictitious) inward investment for AI but the thing is, if AI is as powerful as claimed (and even if not but still useful - my position) building an AI isn’t actually that big an investment for a reasonably sized state (1/5)

The one good thing about my Samsung TV is that whether it displays Samsung TV Plus on startup (and hence GB News) appears to be entirely arbitrary - I’m currently in a period where it boots to a blank screen allowing me to start Twitch or YouTube without having to listen to a racist rant

It still shocks me every day that the boundary between this sort of slurry and the ‘mainstream’ right in this county has completely collapsed. And that there has been so little pushback. I fear for the future.

call me the Demon Core the way I'm prompt critical

I am old enough to remember the vitriol directed at random humanities scholars' work complaining about the totalizing tendencies of capitalism to corrupt, colonize, or co-opt everything. I also lived long enough to read long term coverage of the literal attempt to privatize thinking in the newspaper

See my post last week on how we got into this position of dependence on US tech companies and how we can start extricating ourselves (with a section on Palantir). samf.substack.com/p/sovereignt...

This is, honestly, kind of tying back into one of my perennial fascinations, that because of the nature of open-ended storytelling, Star Wars canon has TWICE now become a deeply pessimistic story of civilizational collapse, and yet very few creators seem to understand that.

my favorite part is that the macrohard reference is so overwrought and unfunny that musk has to explain it and that in doing so he also helpfully lets you know that it's funny, actually

Interestingly a lot of young earth creationist “scientists” are engineers for some reason (I got really into reading takedowns of young earth creationism during my PhD for some reason)

"LLMs simply don't make mistakes like the ones you see here in this passage from Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy" is jokerizing

“MAGA’s fundamental shared quality is a total lack of theory of mind for other people” is a theory that keeps getting validated by reality - look at almost every decision they’ve made in the war with Iran, and how they seem constantly surprised by the unanticipated actions of other parties.

half my timeline is just people smarter than I am posting "dawg" "chat is this good" "woof" and/or horrifying graphs

More seriously: F1 is all about ridiculously over engineered, bespoke systems made without regard to economies of scale on limited production runs at huge expensive. The MOD has already mastered those skills.

usually if you ask experts why an empire fell they’ll say it’s nuanced and multifaceted, so i think it’s kind of cool that with America future historians will get to just say like “oh they took the idiot train to moronsville”

Your Honor, we've crimed so much that it's impossible for us to pay for our crimes

New post just out: "Sovereignty for sale" The UK is uniquely exposed to the power of US tech monopolies - from Palantir to AI and cloud services. Why is it so dangerous? What are other countries doing? And what should we do? (£/free trial) open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/s...

Wonder what China thinks of all this re:Taiwan. Seems bad.

yeah you coukd also just ban this shit

Almost as if the current US administration doesn’t understand that the US military’s superpower has always been logistics and not “lethalitymaxxing” or whatever they’ve decided to call it these days

Am sticking with my bet that the right is reading this wrong and that the majority of voters are not at all unhappy Starmer has upset Trump by holding back from a war whose purpose and end game no-one seems able to define.

Abysmal, immoral, cruel, small hearted, tiny minded, ineffective, undemocratic, and just generally utterly indecent. What a bitter godforesaken disappointment these people are. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Starmer is an expert in finding ways to not have his cake and not eat it

I somewhat understand the rational argument for, like, “this war has started and we’re in no position to undo it, so we have to protect our citizens/bases/allies”, but, I mean, for fuck’s sake, we’re gonna be actively aiding the belligerents in this war