But a real big one, in my view, is the rise of private prisons & the drive away from state care. State hospitals are very far from perfect, but they’re regulated. “Regulation” is a bad word to the guys who want a return to the days of institutionalization.

Watching all this unfold reminded me of Crayton's insight about how viewing ourselves as the "hero or victim, never the villain" is a mechanism of white supremacy. Good is a thing we do. And in order to do it, we need to view "ally" as a verb, not an identity. 14/

The press is supposed to be a vital cog in the machinery of democracy. In Britain, it’s more of a protection racket for some of the very nastiest and most absurdly malicious people in our society.

Do I still know any HCI or computing history people? I'm curious about systems that blur the lines between "undo" and "version control"

This is key - many people will react positively to ideas they initially rejected once they get it. Hard part is talking to them enough that they get it.

One of them hides. Other three pretend there never was a fourth crew member. This works best if the one in hiding has a twin back on Earth who can pop up in the control room and shout “surprise!”

Using AI to make medical decisions can risk your health, according to the largest ever study on the subject by the University of Oxford on large language models. They found LLMs tended to provide inaccurate and inconsistent information. www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/...

It's not just the women and girls we know of. It's all their future work, and everything they could have been, and how we build structures that shelter their abusers. It's how a man's future has always been worth more than my past, present, and future combined.

alt text isn't just a good thing to do for potential readers; it's also a useful practice for you the writer, helping you think through "why am i using this image, what's in it and what's germane about it" on a regular basis

This Wondermark comic is years old and still precisely captures my feelings.

I respect the UK dot gov designers so much because they understand this: there's no competitor or open source alternative to the government. There's just the one place to get these services (which are not only necessary but mandatory), and so the standard of the experience must be impeccable.

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

Peugeot 309 Vauxhall Astra Seat Cordoba Skoda Superb We've had the Skoda nearly 15 years, so might well be on car 5 in the next 5 years.

#Booksky Spooktacular 2025 Day 23: Feed is the start of @seananmcguire.bsky.social’s engaging and innovative riff on zombie fiction. It’s the first thing I ever read from her, full of exciting twists, and its landscape of a shifting news environment has only gotten more relevant with time.

Possibly the ultimate in Oxford policing - both the technique and the reason for keeping protestors out of the road

A fault I see in UK politics: most of our political leaders speak and act like they're trying to follow what the public desire right now, rather than to lead us from where we are to where we "should" be. This leads to nasty consequences.

Okay. The people have spoken. For every reskeet this gets, I will post a random picture from my camera roll with no explanation (other than alt text). Let the games begin.

I think this is a key insight into incel culture; it's about giving adult men the belief that 13 year old's fantasy relationships ought to be real, and that any other form of relationship involves giving up on enjoying life.

When I worked on The Office, Greg Daniels had a list of questions he asked of every story. Some were show-specific (eg “Are we saying something truthful if exaggerated about office life?”), but many are applicable to any script. Here’s a little thread on them… 🧵1/X #Scriptsky #Screenwriting

🧵Spotted on Market Day in Aotearoa New Zealand: A tiny human (1?) is helping Mum sell things. While Mum is greeting customers and taking payments--all one-handed. Tiny Human is propped on her hip, blowing big raspberry kisses of thanks. Giggle-snorting when people blow kisses back. (1)

There's a chunk of people not getting the UK's Online Safety Act. The core problem is that the OSA assumes that (a) any device or connection might be used by an unsupervised child, and (b) that the world has to be child-safe by default. Virtually all the issues with the Act fall out from this.

This link provides a passthrough to those who don't have subscriptions to Science (i.e. most of us).

I've found a useful route to clarifying my thinking about AI recently: if you replace "company's AI" with "company's cheap employee", how does your opinion sound now? For example, training an AI on a work is equivalent in this framing to the employee being trained on that work. 1/n

Nothing like your cat saying HURRY STRANGER to wake you up out of a dead sleep.

Trans men’s insight on this is so fucking valuable in understanding the nuances of what’s going on with men. We need to be amplifying them, and hopefully cis men can realize what is actually the source of their loneliness.

One more thought on trans rights; they often show up the places where your partial solution to a problem caused by male chauvinist social norms is incomplete, or indeed rests on society-endorsed sexism. 1/3

Note that the reason trans people are targeted is that they're an easy first target for bigots. This is why trans rights matter - they are often the first group bigots come for (per Martin Niemöller's famous poem). And you want them there to speak out when the bigots come for you.

In 2016, I introduced you all to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, a boarding school for survivors of fantastic adventures, unimaginable dangers, and other realities.

Reminder that one of my life principles is what I call the "Krissy Rule": If I were to do something and my spouse called me up and asked "what are you doing?" and I was tempted to lie to her about it, I DON'T DO THAT THING. This is a good rule that's mostly kept me out of trouble.

If you are a cis person *please* take 2 minutes to do this. Trans people with non-updated gender markers, historical gender marker changes, and X markers are terrified to travel right now; rolling back this policy would mean a lot.