A walk in the sunshine today ended at All Saints Church, Brockhampton. It's an unusual and beautiful little place: thatched roof, a wooden belltower, graceful curved arches, and a lovely little pipe organ. Built 1902.

This is wonderful, brilliant, clear writing on, to me, the most interesting of all subjects. 👏

Ask an LLM what it is like being a parent, flying an aeroplane or being stung by a wasp, and it will reply in similar words to those that a human would use, or more likely has used. But this is not the same as having those experiences. General intelligence emerges from such experiences.

This is brilliant.

This is creepy when we recognise contemporary AI is all humans all the way down, just obfuscated behind the screen or dashboard. Based on stolen data, stolen labour, stolen humanity... AI is not currently emancipatory and just serves the privileged and deskills those who think this is automation.

An interesting idea here is that “theory of mind” is how humans will always outperform AI without it, but it's also why humans see consciousness in LLMs. It's like pareidolia but instead of seeing a face, we see a mind. It's all just clever mimicry.

And formally provably so because to drive you need theory of mind. You can indeed show with maths the limits of maths since it's a formal engineered system with knowable limits, see Gödel etc. We created trains which ban humans from tracks so the system can be safely automated, not so for roads. 1/n

This seems to me like he's panicking. The techno hype is finally, predictably, losing its power, and so he flaps his arms and confabulates even wilder fantasies to beg the investors to keep giving him their money. The bubble wobbles a lttle more.

This excellent long read from @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social is full of wisdom, insights and ideas, some already known, perhaps, many not, but all beautifully expressed. Highly recommended reading. www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Please spread this far and wide, as stories don't get much bigger than this. When the government blocks even the intelligence services from telling us we're heading for environmental catastrophe, you know we have a problem. A very big problem. Thank you. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“Don’t ask” From the Private Eye archive. Issue 711, March 1989.

Quaternions are so much more elegant and efficient than Euler angles.

Forgive me... but I had to write something about the Many Worlds view of quantum mechanics. It comes out of a discussion I had here with @orzelc.bsky.social (who, to my knowledge, is not actually an Everettian). philipball86.substack.com/p/on-the-man...

This is mesmerizing stuff. I'd love to know more about the data used to generate it, and what is being assumed and omitted. aeon.co/videos/groun...

Brilliant talk! There is such clarity of language and ideas here. I love the way that, right at the start, the many mistaken ideas of what quantum mechanics says are roundly rebutted. The analogy between quantum reality and a modified game of twenty questions is really superb. Thank you for this!

My wife received a "pair" of gloves for a Christmas present. They are both left-handed. Clearly they were not an entangled pair when they were created. #quantum #entanglement #wavefunction

Pretty much every word of this is fantasy or bullshit or both. (The bit of Trump sycophancy at the end is the final straw.) Why do we just keep reporting what these guys say, and not interrogate it? I despair sometimes. www.theguardian.com/technology/n...

This is yet another mind-expanding piece. Hard to keep up.

Have any musicians here had dealings with The Orchard music distribution company? I mean the company now owned by Sony: theorchard dot com. #music #musicians #musicdistribution #musiclabels #musicpublishing

Winter woodland walk today. The first picture is of a huge ancient yew now forming a wide ring through which the path passes. We call it The Portal Tree. The second picture is of two lines of hornbeam between which the path goes. #woodland #walks #ukwoods #winter

But, what? #BBCNews and #BBCpolitics have been right-wing, establishment-biased for decades, increasingly so, and now Tim Davie resigns because it's not right-wing enough?

We went to the magnificent 1000 year-old Pershore Abbey today to hear the Worcester Philharmonic Orchestra play Sibelius: Finlandia, Violin Concerto and Symphony 2. The place was heaving, at least 500 people in the audience. Brilliant performance. #livemusic #music #pershore #sibelius #classical

This honestly should be required reading for anyone undertaking (or evaluating) exploratory studies... ⬇️👍 (It's proper funny too 😅)

So Amazon Web Services goes down and lots of people's doorbells stop working. The world has gone mad.

@opalstack.com are brilliant. I wish they had a larger presence here. If you are a lone developer or a large company needing managed webhosting OpalStack are the people to use. Their technical support is unequalled.

No mention of why extreme heat conditions now exist for them at all: www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/o... #climate #climatebreakdown #globalwarming

A highly experienced, long-time professional orchestral, session and live musician just said of my band: "Not many bands can groove hard at low volumes like this band. It's classy." Blimey. That feels good! applebystone.com #livemusic #jazz #folk #acoustic #music

Can you help?… I’m trying to find my people I know there’s more space fans here… just not sure how to reach you Feels weird to ask, but would you give me a signal boost by hitting share? If you’re new… Hi I’m Cat, I make pretty picture of space 🥹 let’s connect if you like weird space art

Anne-Marie at her wonderful best. The new song is intriguing.

So beautiful ...

Have you ever seen a kestrel hunting, hovering on a blustery hilltop wind, adjusting, accommodating to the boisterous, buffeting air so that its eyes remain fixed in space to better follow the motions of its prey? I have, and many people have. No "AI" has. #AI #AGI #LLM #ChatGPT #OpenAI

Mary Colwell asks whether it's time to talk about a fox cull. I argue it's time to talk about the absurd annual release of 60 Million non-native gamebirds that undoubtedly supports the over-abundance of foxes & other mesopredators. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Don't Panic!

I started some wine two days ago from grapes picked from the vine growing against the back of my house in Herefordshire. After filtering, the specific gravity (OG) is 1086, in the upper range for wine. No added sugar is needed. And the colour is really good. Almost unbelieveable. #winemaking #ukwine

My wife fears large house spiders. When I'm gone I will be replaced by a vacuum cleaner.

I see people bleating yet again that "elections are won from the centre". Let's examine this claim. 1. Not long ago, the current Labour government, with its grovelling to corporations and oligarchs, extreme deregulation, island of strangers rhetoric etc, would have been classed as radical right. 🧵

Those who can channel our anger at 15 years of misrule, who can speak the language of outrage and hope, are the politicians of the moment. They will contribute to what could be, in 2029, the greatest electoral reset in our modern history. This week's column. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Silver-washed Fritillary, female, seen today in The Slade, a lovely forest valley descending from Offa's Dyke near Tintern, and the relevant page from my ancient copy of Sandars. #ukbutterflies #butterflies

Perseids putting on a fine show here. Some lighting up the houses and trees. Four very bright ones in 10 minutes in our restricted piece of sky. #perseids

Today's crop: french beans (climbing), courgette, cherry tomatoes and a couple of pies worth of damsons. We have a tiny plot at the front of the house, overlooked by wild damsons from an ancient orchard, and we get lots of produce from it. #veg #ukgardening

We spent most of the day today stuck on the road, to and from a funeral. The only good part of it was to learn that the Welsh for "queue" is "ciw".

Oops, I forgot about bluesky for a bit. But conveniently remembered because my album is now available on 12" eco-vinyl... and it's bandcamp Friday! (Bandcamp waives its fee and artists get a bigger slice of the pie...)... If you'd like a copy, please step this way: annemariesanderson.bandcamp.com

My daughter is recovering from severe food poisoning which made a disaster of her Tour Du Mont Blanc holiday trek. She fell ill in Champex Lac. The reviews of local eating places there are full of reports of food poisoning. What's going on there? #TMB #tourdumontblanc #swissalps #hiking #montblanc

I have to repeat this. (Doing the downstairs now.)

A last, a breeze!

I had some old 2-by-4s and 2-by-3s that had been lying behind the shed for ~20 years, so this year I decided to make a trough with them. It's now bursting with dill, parsely, basil and looks marvellous. It's a real delight to pick some of its produce every day. #herbs #ukgardening #kitchengarden

Last night we went to see our daughter Tansy's debut as guitarist in death doom metal band The Drowning. She was magnificent. Powerful lead playing. They were officially "awesome". #metal #deathmetal #doommetal

Thyme for a risotto. This time of year is marvellous!

Croft Ambrey today. A handful of swifts skimming the common, but there should have been hundreds. It was good to see them though.

This so brilliantly exposes the chronic ignorance behind so much of this country's land management practices.