At some point I will get off my arse and create a blue sky feed that is exactly the same as the standard feed but hides all the chain quote posts

I wrote a short piece for the Observer on the attacks in Manchester. observer.co.uk/news/opinion...

This is the clearest explanation of the AT Protocol and *why it matters* I have read so far

Maybe it's just me, but this is an incredibly confusing visualisation.

I know everyone bangs on about exercise being good for mental health - the conclusion I gave arrived at for me is that exercise is horrible whilst it is happening, but not exercising for a while is just a different sort of horrible. Pick your poison 🤷🏾‍♂️

Ann-other was right there 😂

Have written up some of my thoughts about the increasingly sinister use of 'non-UK born' and 'white British' in the British press. The obsession with 'white British' citizens over other British citizens harms all of us and needs to be called out. benansell.substack.com/p/who-counts

What do you reckon then?

"It’s interesting to see the issue spoken about in terms of civic cohesion, with a responsibility on us all to tackle demographic challenges, rather than a burden for the young alone" On the German idea of a "Boomer solidarity tax" and national service... www.newstatesman.com/politics/202...

"Heirarchical" gets me like a usb 2.0 connection

I am going to a Pokémon themed stag do in a couple of weeks. My immediate thought was to go as Brock. My wife suggested I go as diglett 😭

Q. Who aligns the aligners? A. alignmentalignment.ai Today I’m humbled to announce an epoch-defining event: the launch of the 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗜 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀.

I started playing hollow knight to see what all the fuss is about. Jfc when did video games get so hard? I JUST WANT TO EXPLORE!

Waiting for updates to finish Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...

Scientists struggle to follow these standards, what hope do the media or the rest of the public have?

My day of free headshots for science people went so well in London that I'm doing one in Cambridge. Oct 9th afternoon at Canopy (CISL). Email [email protected] if you'd like free pictures to use to promote yourself and do websites and socials and that.

And frankly I prefer a dynamic that secures decent housing for people in the greatest housing need first, than one that secures decent housing for those in greatest housing need a few years down the line via chain dynamics

I would be interested to read an analysis on whether it would be enough for the 10-15% drifting (let's call them reform curious) to just stay at home in the next election rather than for labour to specifically convert them.

realistic Star Trek

Protocols in Python are one of the best ways for a golang engineer at heart to have their cake and eat it Defining interfaces at the point of use is such a powerful principle

By my reading this is effectively the "follow your passion" argument, which is is simply not sustainable for 90% of the population

If you haven't listened to them, the episodes of cautionary tales with @timharford.ft.com covering SBF and EA are excellent 👌🏾

My wife has taken my new favourite picture of Zag. Peak gormless!

I’ve mulled over posting this for months now. But yesterday it came to a head. And I’m aware that the people who need to see it will either not be here, or will suggest that I’m lying. I live near an asylum hotel. The reason I didn’t post earlier is that I didn’t want to raise undue attention

This is Zag, he has a perfectly sized normal bed in the other corner of this room, but sometimes he chooses this bed that belongs to his (much smaller) friend Toby 🙄

What a fantastic diagram 🙌🏾

The most likely explanation for how this ridiculous advice made it through is that it was either generated by an LLM, or vetted by one and everyone else involved decided not to bother with any critical thinking whatsoever

I've said it before, and I will say it again: It's astonishing how emotionally aversive revisions are, even in the best possible case (reviewers are positive and have very actionable remarks). Or at least that's how I work; if anybody has some good recommendations for coping, do let me know 😂

This is an excellent thread, and is a subset of the problem of "answering the question you want to, instead of the question you need to"

A beautiful piece in its own right, there are so many nuggets of wisdom related to agency, selfhood and decision-making all wrapped up in a nice chocolate analogy. I really wish bish had existed when I was a teenager, it's a great resource

A lady at the beach said my dog looks like Clint Eastwood and I have never been more confused in my life

Among all the weird takes that seem to be popular online, the one that always gets me is that studying STEM somehow morally corrupts people and the solution is to make people additionally go through a humanities and/or social science curriculum at the university level.

Whilst I love (and agree entirely) with the sentiment, academia is so competitive I don't think we can blame anyone for trying to jump through the hoops with an assist, and then worry about the learning bit later. The root cause here is scarcity of opportunity in academia

Paper shaped objects is an excellent turn of phrase 👌🏾

Giving this another go!

I had a productive day, but I fully intend to waste this evening listening to #TomLehrer RIP

I'm seeing a lot of commentary blaming the egregious data leak from the Tea dating safety app on vibe coding I'm confident that, in this particular case, that's not what happened: the code at fault looks to have been written back in late 2023 simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/26/...

I suppose, in a way, it's sortof an unbroken temporal link to every one of your maternal ancestors since the evolution of placental mammals some 120 millions years ago?

Perhaps it's just me but the old logo is barely readable

Plot twist - now we have the uv python package tool, communism is finally viable!

It's a real conundrum that the people these tools are aimed at are often the least qualified to evaluate whether the tool is behaving correctly

The best BBC radio adaptations (but not children's hour) you can get on Audible are: - the le carre novels with Simon Russel Beale as George smiley - the sherlock holmes novels with Clive Merrifield as sherlock The most excellent radio dramatisations you could hope to find.

I still randomly think about: - the hedgehogs crossing the motorway - the poisoned cabbages - the pheasant who finds his wife killed by a farmer and is then shot himself

Saw a beautiful hummingbird bird moth in the garden this morning!

These results are honestly mind-boggling.

I honestly just talk to my dog 🤷🏾‍♂️

I turned 35 this week, and I am very lucky to say that each year has been an improvement on the last

Worth a watch: Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

Software engineer analogy for this: if you discover a bug in production - do you fix forward, or revert to a version that didn't have the bug? And if you revert, do you scrub the offending commit from version control? In almost all cases I would fix forward and leave the history intact 🤷🏾‍♂️