Have read, strong recommend

I did a roundtable with some PhD students yesterday on the current existential problem of UK tech policy: it doesn't matter how much evidence you take to the table, it doesn't matter how credible the research is, you will have no impact if you don't promise AI will deliver the moon on a stick

Thousands have turned out for an Anti-Racism rally in Belfast city centre, organised by United Against Racism and supported by Trade Unions

🔴 NEW 🔴 Zia Yusuf is making the trip to Trumpland tomorrow to address the Heritage Foundation - the group that wrote Trump's authoritarian, extreme second term agenda

Just watch this… And for the love of God, please see Farage for what he is. His response to Sarah Everard Vs his response to Henry Nowak Jaw dropping.

It’s a good day youtu.be/3ziixar3gqI?...

Wait, are people buying Drake’s albums? Is Kendrick going to sue?

Arguably the best live gig I ever saw: Miles Davis, Royal Festival Hall, London, 19 July (?) 1991 Didn’t intend to go but a ticket came up and… Happy 100th birthday Miles

It is only a matter of time before that cat knocks that vase from the window sill to the floor and smashes it. But that fly won’t catch itself.

You’re younger than you think.

If you don’t bake accessibility into your product then it isn’t a product, it’s a demo

So we're not ungovernable, but our system makes the kind of government we may get, incredibly dangerous. I've written more here substack.com/@pimlicat81/...

In 2014, we redesigned and rebuilt one of UK gov's biggest services in just 10 weeks. We started with a multidisciplinary team and a prototype. It handled £2m of transactions in it's first 6 days. dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2026/re...

As a poetry co-editor for the Morning Star, I want to feature poets who are often marginalised. Except they seem to be marginalising themselves by not sending their work. Send poems for June! I'd be grateful to receive them at: [email protected] morningstaronline.co.uk/article/new-...

Wading into current affairs with a reflection on the thing that I think would go a long, long way to helping Britain figure out what it is we want to do for the rest of the 21st century instead of lurching from one political crisis to another. Because I, for one, am exceptionally bored of it.

Farage spent years on the RT payroll. Met privately with the Russian ambassador. Said Putin was the world leader he most admired. Defended the annexation of Crimea. The man about to inherit your country has spent 20 years on the wrong side of the war for Europe's future. 7/12

You don't have to imitate Reform's policies. That's a losing trade every centre-left party has made for 30 years. The original haters will always outbid the cover band. 10/12

Brexit was a policy. What's coming next is a regime change. Reform is running on mass deportations. Gutting the BBC. War with the judiciary. A foreign policy authored in Mar-a-Lago and proofread in the Kremlin. 8/12

New blog post: NHS Goes To War Against Open Source https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/nhs-goes-to-war-against-open-source/ The NHS is preparing to close nearly all of its Open Source repositories. Throughout my time working for the UK Government - in GDS, NHSX, i.AI, and others - I championed …

people need to be clear about the root-cause of the problem, i.e big tech and be better informed about what genAI can/can’t do so we are not deluding ourselves with these technical solutions and most importantly so we can demand better from the industry 3/

this is not a real solution because, 1) “facts” and “dis/misinfo” are not problems that can be “solved” with technical tools alone, and 2) false assurance as this will give the illusion of “solving” the problem while potentially exacerbating it 2/

it is interesting that the response from academics, investigative journos, and civil society alike to genAI polluting the information ecosystem has been building “fact checking” and “dis/misinfo detecting” tools on top of the very non-deterministic technology that has caused the very problem 1/

And we need to be braver to say so. Labour, specifically, needs to say so. They won’t, of course, which is one of many reasons they’re losing their supporters.

If you’ve read the thread posted by palantir on X and are shocked, please read this piece that @tlecaque.bsky.social and I wrote 9 months ago. Palantir has not been shy about its fascist agenda, and neither has Karp, who has been rambling about Western Supremacy in text & video form for a while now

What keeps coming up again and again is the risk of AI is really the flattening and erasure of plural forms of knowledge and capability with one way of doing things. To appropriate the Zapatista slogan, we need a world where many worlds not only fit but thrive and flourish

I'm working on a foresight review on the safe adoption of AI in complex and engineered systems. Just back from a very intense and brilliant week in Kenya, working with all kinds of experts, and I've never felt more strongly that human knowledge(s) & capabilities are *amazing*

🔊GDS has updated the Service Manual to reflect changes to the assurance of digital and technology spend. We've published a new page setting out how digital and technology spending decisions are made, the role of departments, and when HMT or GDS involvement is needed. www.gov.uk/service-manu...

There are only two seasons - the one where the clock in my car will tell the same time as the official clock, and the one where it won’t. Happy samer-time to all who celebrate. May your living be easy.

A modern day retelling of Narcissus. A man uploaded the products of his imagination into an app, and it used them to reflect his fantasies back at him. Yay. Fun. And he became uncontrollably obsessed with his own reflection. Oopsie. Booooo. …

if Wikipedia, an org with a shoestring budget and volunteer workforce can ban use of llms, what excuse do large orgs and universities have

Have you wondered where the claim that autistic people lack empathy came from? The 'jellyfish' study (2011) was influential in this, as it concluded that autistic people lacked Theory of Mind & capacity for moral reasoning. medicalxpress.com/news/2011-01... ⬇️ #Empathy #ActuallyAutistic

Dear Hugo Voters and #Worldcon attendees, Please consider my short story "One Small Step" for nomination this year. You can read it for free at the link below (Photo Illustration by @joemacleod666.bsky.social). It features Marxist cockroaches.

are you displeased with today’s AI safety evaluation landscape and curious about what greater conceptual clarity, methodological soundness, and rigour in AI evaluation could look like? if so, consider coming to Dublin to pursue a PhD with me apply here: aial.ie/hiring/phd-a... pls repost

Right gang - I see some of you have your work brains re-engaged - I'm looking for recommendations of blogposts about why the Service Standard has been so important and how to embed it in a teams ways of working. I have the classics but looking for a refresh for a talk. Thanks and Happy New Year 🥳

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

We're only able to do this work - helping people stand up to Far right bullies - because tens of thousands of you have set up direct debits to support our work. But the cost of living crisis means our income is getting squeezed - and we could really use your support. goodlawproject.org/donate/

There are only two seasons - the one where the clock in my car tells the right time, and the one where the clock in my car tells the wrong time. Happy wrongtimetide to all who celebrate.

Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.

“These findings follow previous research which concluded that the more people learn about how AI works, the less they trust it. The opposite was also true — AI’s biggest fanboys tended to be those who understood the least about the tech.”

Can anyone point me to any work on how the principle of free speech can evolve and adapt to an age where industrial-scale misinformation and political grooming, funded by bad actors, has become the norm?

Racism and authoritarian nativism have become normalized in British politics in warp speed. Not only rhetorically but as guiding principles of policy. Yet, many still talk about "populism" as if it were 2016. The idea that "this isn't Britain" is keeping people from clearly assessing where we are.

The god Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy. When C refused Apollo’s advances, he turned the gift into a curse, decreeing that though she would see futures, no one would ever believe her. She warned people. They mocked her. They scorned her. They even blamed her. There’s a lot of it about.

Quite. So many Labour people on this website visibly have no idea of just how bad things have got for ethnic minorities since they came on, and how their visible indifference lands.

I need you to understand what this country feels like right now for those of us who look different. I'm sitting here, trying to plan for Saturday, make sure I don't even need to go to the corner shop for milk, like it's Christmas Day or lockdown. Why? Because I live near where Yaxley-Lennon will 1/

New blog post: Yet another AI Racism example https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/09/yet-another-ai-racism-example/ Here's a good pub-quiz trivia question - which Oscar-winning Actors have appeared in Doctor Who? It's the sort of thing that you can either wrack your brains for, or construct a SPARQL …

In this short piece, I lean on embodied cog sci to argue that we should refuse & resist llms in education (pp. 53-58) unesdoc.unesco.org/in/documentV... "the classroom is an environment where love, trust, empathy, care & humility are fostered & mutually cultivated through dialogical interactions"

"Why do all these migrants have expensive mobile phones?!?!?" A blog post from a decade ago which is, tragically, still relevant today. shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/09...