The Kenyan government halted talks on a Microsoft AI data center after it became clear that the project would consume half the country's daily power output www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...

Today's university job losses info is from Edinburgh Napier. The crisis is still accelerating. Nothing will be done. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2610095...

Really good news. The EHRC has lost its way over the last decade - most obviously, but by no means exclusively, over trans rights. Let's hope these appointments mark a turning point.

An outstandingly churlish response to being asked to just credit a writer and thinker for their work.

Labour MPs showed much boredom at the amount I talked about the Govt’s outrageous attack on jury equity while I was on the committee for the Courts and Tribunals Bill. This principle, established firmly since 1670 (!) must remain in place, and any new leader absolutely must leave juries alone.

No, imagine my shock

Coincidentally, the number of staff currently at risk of redundancy (2700) at the University of Nottingham is the same as the number of jobs at risk at British Steel. Yesterday, the govt said they aren't neutral on job losses & so pledged to save those steel jobs. Watch as they blithely ignore HE.

Fun fact: the magical child safety solution which Jess Philips cited in her resignation letter is a vendor-specific offering, which benefited from an intense PR and lobbying campaign, and was previously praised by ... Prince Andrew. I always keep the receipts. heatherburns.tech/2026/02/20/t...

It's surprising how quickly Sanders has been taken the existential risk bait. It took less than a year for him to start doing events with Hinton and Tegmark. He should perhaps pause to consider how groups like FLI are so well-resourced, and what political function x-risk narratives serve.

"Universities increasingly invoke #AcademicFreedom as if this suspends the need for responsibility and accountability. Academic freedom, however, does not mean that all forms of programming or arguments are equally legitimate, nor that institutional platforms are neutral by default."

Holocaust denial, but the newspapers pretending to give a damn about antisemitism, The Times, Telegraph and Mail, haven't covered it because it's not about the Greens.

In case anyone else interested in my thoughts on NNs creating knowledge representations for Othello ... www.lesswrong.com/posts/nmxzr2...

Can I just ask, #r4today, as you seem to be very keen to talk about and investigate Polanski’s council tax issue, why not the same feverish scrutiny over the far more troubling and glaringly corrupt £5M bribe Farage took from that crypto billionaire, Harborne? We can hear your strings being pulled.

And when next week The Times or @danneidle.bsky.social have been found going through Polanski's bins, we can trust the BBC to report that without comment too. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Shabana Mahmood revolting against Starmer is good news. Remove the whip from her, giving her the chance to join Reform with their assortment of failed xenophobic ministers.

We’ve been here before, haven’t we? Everybody believed Iraq had those weapons. All of us borrowed too much money before the 2008 crash. We all thought brutal austerity was essential. We all just wanted to get Brexit done. One avoidable disaster after another, and nobody to blame for any of it.

Between 2019 and 2024, almost three-quarters of the £22m Reform received in donations came from just nine individuals or companies, all of whom are based offshore.

Civil society is gonna have to start punching back at the far-right bullies in politics and the media, and a big part of that is having a government that gives people confidence that it will side with them as they stand up for social liberalism rather than try to appease its political enemies

Good piece on the contradictions and hypocrisy of the Corcoran (who she?) 'discrimination' case: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Would it help if the media published more confident pictures of Starmer?

NEW: ChatGPT advised the FSU shooter that a mass shooting would get more attention from media if it involved several children, according to a new lawsuit against OpenAI www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

RLDF: Reinforcement Learning by Divine Feedback!

"Why won't the left and other minorities stand with us? Also we think Reform are great" I am absolutely furious with @boardofdeputies.bsky.social

I’m not sure this is entirely about antisemitism guys

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale. Tech Company: Uh oh, you shouldn't have said that. Now our Torment Nexus maker will make the Torment Nexus

And later in the day Tice attended the ‘antisemitism’ rally.

JK Rowling is now represented by a trans person in the Scottish parliament. Absolutely incredible.

Six years ago The Observer let me write this op-ed. Nothing much changed. If asked to do same, I'd probably say "AI" in context of Google and DeepMind, mention Palantir, and use OpenSafely as the example of sharing access, not data. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Wes Streeting wants new laws to force your GP to share your medical records. The bill was not in Labour's Manifesto and Palantir has explicitly said, under a new Government, it would be happy to use medical data for other purposes. Be afraid.

🧵My response: “This statement is utterly enraging. The government is doing the exact opposite of what it claims. Taking away gender affirming healthcare for trans youth is taking away their dignity and is completely disrespectful of their autonomy.

These two MSPs are going to face horrors and will need a lot of cross party support. I hope we'll be helping with that, @alex.scotlibdems.org.uk

They're just straight up calling autism a social contagion now. Exactly the same thing they did to trans people.

IDF soldier who participated in the mistaken killing of three Israeli hostages in Gaza City in Dec 2023 confirmed to his mother what was widely reported at the time: they killed the men, who were waving white flags, because their unit was under orders to kill all Gazan men they encountered.

So, the transphobia aimed at a newly elected [Trans] member of parliament has already started The national broadcaster [the BBC] uncritically using language to describe Trans+ people that Trans+ people 1. Do NOT use to describe themselves 2. Consider to be highly offensive, and dehumanising

In the same election the ranks of MSPs who voted against GRR were turfed out of office - among their replacements were two new trans MSPs. The politics of hate took a kicking today. The politics of trans liberation brought two of their own into the seats of power in Scotland! 🏳️‍⚧️ 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

The people to blame for reform are: 1. People who chose to vote for the far right (Reform voters). 2. People who aped the far right political positions and amplified their hateful rhetoric (the Labour party, media etc.) That’s it. Not the Greens, not the Lib Dems, not the people told to fuck off:

now thats an anecdote with a punch, from Gillian Tett www.ft.com/content/c0ae...

Anyone insinuating that the rise of "populism" is some bottom-up, grassroots phenomenon is selling you a lie. The popularity of Reform is down to vast quantities of money fuelling a tightly orchestrated media disinformation machine.

We voted out the Tories, only to find that, after a long 14 years of waiting, a Labour government adopts and extends some of their worst policies, while entirely failing to excite or inspire. Now Labour and its supporters on this platform blame us for turning away. What aren’t they seeing here?

This week's net.wars, "The soul in the machine", considers Richard Dawkins' expressed belief that his interactions with Anthropic's Claude show that the chatbot is conscious: netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/05/08/t...

The way in which Kuensberg allows the blokes of various parties to talk over and gang up on Rachel Millward is an absolute disgrace.

“An AI generator for posts would turn this into a clanker forum of AI's talking to each other..." Someone talking about their hatred of AI... on a cybercrime forum

In the appendix of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins describes the 1960s chatbot ELIZA, which simulated Rogerian counselling, and in a slightly mocking tone described the "ELIZA effect" where users would fall under the illusion that the ELIZA program was conscious.

I agree: • Antisemitism has no place in a decent society. • Neither does Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia or racism. Making a cause of anti-trans campaigning under the banner of “free speech” has muddied the water, arguably deliberately.

Sharing, without comment, British newspapers’ depictions of the only Jewish person currently leading a UK political party . Times. Mail. Telegraph. Sun.

Worth reading until the end: "both the possible motive of the giver and the use to which the gift is to be put should be considered", "if there is any doubt, the benefit should be registered". That's pretty unambiguous to me. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Gosh, I wonder if there are any other minorities under constant attack suffering from "victim attrition". Cough Linehan Cough. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Babe wake up, new techno optimist manifesto just dropped

Hannah Fry learned nothing useful from this. Ends with "don't let her incompetence fool you, because these things are getting better fast".