Add “AI is not a person” to all newspaper style guides asap

When I, a person with a not particularly huge follower count, regularly get more engagement on here than a government department does on Twitter, the comms value of the latter activity is… hard to see

Lost amid the discussion of why the Government should get off X is its utter uselessness as an engagement tool and the fact departments are wasting vast sums making content for it. Take this:

I wrote a short piece on those at the top of Silicon Valley, AI, and the inevitability of mortality. Featuring a title reference I've been desperate to squeeze in for ages! medium.com/@conorsewell...

Yep. The conflation of LLMs and AI in general is going to lead to an awful lot of waste and disaster as people slowly discover that general purpose LLMs do not and cannot do all the things they want them to.

I’ve been looking back at my favourite songs/albums of the year, and honestly my biggest realisation is I slept way, way too much on Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties in 2024. Go listen to Paying Bills at the End of the World, and if you like that all of In Lieu Of Flowers. You won’t regret it.

Official government accounts should not be posting on Twitter, for the same reasons that they don’t post on 4chan or kiwifarms.

Grok + X now seems to be awash with images undressing women, without consent. It is an issue with the potential for a very very broad coalition - across political divides - to insist the Musk platform gets back within the law, on all fronts, not just this example. www.cnbctv18.com/technology/g...

"What was your favourite game of 2025?" Keir Starmer - *sincere answer about spending his limited time with his kids playing Mario Kart, delivered as if he just googled it* Ed Davey - "I still love a bit of Wii Sports" Kemi Badenoch - "My best friend was killed by a Sega Mega Drive"

Kuba isn’t kidding btw. Fully a third of the word count of Starmer’s email to members is about getting rid of the two-child cap. One would hope that this might prompt some reassessment of why they pursued a strategy so centred around *not* removing it for so long…

Why is Badenoch like this

Starmer’s, and thus Labour’s, strategy is not working. The biggest issue is that he’s so fundamentally holed below the water line at this point that a necessary step one to turning things around is replacing him.

Reading One of the Boys by @dirtbagqueer.rocks and it’s SO GOD DAMN GOOD. Cannot recommend it enough to anyone and everyone.

It’s worth mentioning, though it’s been said repeatedly: the Lizzie Line carries 1/6th of UK daily rail passengers (not including the Tube) and has already paid off its entire costs. And if HS2 had been committed to, without plans being tweaked every 5 minutes, Phase 1 would be opening next year.

"And I never say no" We need to have a serious talk about the way "AI companion" apps not only prey on the vulnerable, but are priming their users to ignore consent and to conflate love with control. We need AI regulations across so many sectors, but this area is particularly horrifying.

Incredible Raiders fact (given how much turnover we’ve had at Head Coach): The last time we hired a first-time HC with any NFL offensive play calling experience was in 2011

Post-Christmas sales shopping has sadly meant being forced to listen to You’re the Inspiration by Chicago in full, an experience which has given me newfound sympathy for @shadowtodd.bsky.social and his views on Peter Cetera

I grew up in one of the most Tory, countryside constituencies you’ll ever find and even then the number of people who give a shit about this is essentially a rounding error

At this time, there’s a million different reviews of the year. Squidge’s is one of the few that’s always worth watching in full!

I refuse to believe this wasn’t intentional

The UK will celebrate net emigration and depopulation come 2027. And by 2028 it will start to realise, with an ageing society and low growth, what a really silly thing it has done. The right will go "pro-natalist", the centre-left will be completely stuck.

If this is true, this is one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen from a Cabinet minister - a high bar!

Just one more anti-migrant announcement will fix this bro, I swear, please bro, just one more announcement

Important life news: graduating today with distinction in my second Masters, this time in astrophysics. Couldn’t have done it without the support of my fiancée and my family! 💖

Not an immediate problem for Starmer (still holds the NEC regardless etc) but - depending on what happens in the upcoming GMB GenSec election - things could be lining up for a soft left challenger. Entirely unrelated, Angela Rayner is Unison…

I'd give this more credance if the UK's ramp up in defense spending was rather more urgent than '2.5% of GDP in a few years time'

Possibly retro joke, but: it might be quicker to require them to declare if they’re not

I get that the worst parts of the “cancel culture” era were not great, but maybe now that we seem to have lost any real form of social sanction for truly blatant racism, misogyny, homophobia etc, commentators who spend all their time railing against it could admit they had their priorities wrong?

Just because it's being passed around a lot: NO, data centers in space do NOT benefit from space being cold. Space is cold in the formal sense we use to define temperature. But it is very bad at cooling. What would you rather have to cool hot metal: a lukewarm water tub or a giant cold atmosphere?

The belief that public opinion is an inherently unchanging thing which political parties and elites have no power to influence is: 1. Completely untrue and without evidence 2. A key reason left-of-centre parties lose No one likes a coward! Have some backbone and fight for your beliefs!

Good Lord

Great things are happening in American Christian theology, great things

keir_starmer.jpg

Boy, the Prime Minister who’s repeatedly said that growth is his number one priority will be furious when he hears about this!

You don’t need to read beyond the first of these to go “you are so fundamentally unserious that you are essentially a six year old child playing at being a policy expert”

Maybe the answer to “where is the British Silicon Valley?” is that our nerds are just much more old school (and cooler and less shitty)

Is this a bigger L for American far-right losers, tankies, or the post-war international architecture? Debate it in the comments!

Co-Pilot is currently running an advert of a negotiation where a woman types in 'what's the minimum we can sell for and still hit Q3 targets' This is *mental*, this person should obviously know this backwards! It's her literal job!

Fundamentally, the thing that’s most absurd about the current Labour strategy of catering to the right is that you’re pursuing a pool of voters who are unlikely to vote Labour (only a small percentage of current Reform voters backed Labour in 2024) over a pool (Greens/LDs/DK) where many of them did!

As someone who is bad with faces and worse with names, I need to tattoo this advice on my arm

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD USE HYPHENS

The way I'd put it is that there's currently a global struggle between democracy and nationalist gangster-capitalism, that this struggle is simultaneously unfolding both within and between states, and that the US currently sits at its epicentre

Twitter becomes the first site to take a hit from the EU Digital Services Act *ELON MUSK'S X HIT WITH €120M EU FINE FOR CONTENT LAW BREACHES *EU COMMISSION SAYS X MADE 3 VIOLATIONS OF DIGITAL SERVICES ACT *EU GIVES X 60 DAYS TO PROVIDE SOLUTIONS, 90 DAYS TO IMPLEMENT

Labour’s strategists have a serious case of Last War Syndrome - preparing the party to fight the elections of the past rather than the one which actually faces it

Oh look this is relevant again

I am begging y’all, please cut things off immediately with any guy who listens to this. It’s for your own good

Also, to be clear: the problem with diagnoses is that they’re too hard to access, not too easy (particularly for adults). In large parts of the country, including where I live, you have to wait more than five years (often much more) for an autism/ADHD diagnosis unless you can afford to go private.

This is somewhat nerdy/technical but reveals utterly woeful practices at the OBR – where they relied on free Wordpress plugins to protect some of the most sensitive economic data the UK publishes. Absolutely dismal stuff, and not just one junior staffer screwing up.

The phrase “Jesus fucking Christ” comes to mind…

My brothers in Christ, you are several decades too late to stop left wing nerds taking over tabletop gaming