Govt claims requiring all adults in Britain to have “digital ID” will “help control borders” and “illegal immigtation”. That could only be true if police are given powers to require ID, without suspicion of a crime. A 🧵explaining why:

I’ve been struck by how the British far right is using deepfake technology — less to deceive about specific events, more to tap into fascistic affects & desires. This is really frightening. My dispatch from grim corners of the Internet, for @lrb.co.uk online. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

Can LLMs distinguish between robust findings and research that has been retracted due to errors, fraud, or other serious concerns? QTWAIN blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

Starmer’s Labour as landfill indie. thesphinxblog.com/2025/09/26/c...

No idea about the consensus, but I thought I'd give Gemini a go. I expected it to fail, but I didn't think it would fail quite this spectacularly. It's actually very interesting where it failed. I gave Gemini Rostovzeff's's floor plan of the house church in Dura Europos (image attached).

Once a professor who used to have quite interesting things to say. Now a madman.

CHOTINER: So, tell me about this ‘possession for all time’ idea. THUCYDIDES: Well, my book should be useful to anyone who wants true understanding of the past. CHOTINER: Because present and future events tend to resemble the past, right? THUCYDIDES: Absolutely.

Yes. So much of this would be clear academic misconduct or negligence if only people hadn't been led to believe investor money is a foolproof loophole for laws, norms, and accountability.

Nach langen Gesprächen mit einigen Menschen, die die AfD unterstützen, kann ich sagen. Artikel 3 des Grundgesetzes hat für sie keine reale Bedeutung (mehr). Sie wählen die AfD, weil sie rechtsextrem, rassistisch und verfassungsfeindlich ist. Keine neue Erkenntnis, aber sie muss verstanden werden.

Fascinating to realise, looking at some of the replies in this thread, that I’ve been in a Bluesky bubble in which I never encounter anyone defending Starmer’s current performance. They DO exist!

CHOTINER: So tell me about this secret chord COHEN: it goes like this: the fourth, fifth CHOTINER: but it doesn't seem very secret, you told loads of people about it COHEN: (sweating) ok but it pleased the Lord CHOTINER: does he speak to you often? COHEN: Uhh CHOTINER: It's also not a chord

All right everybody, time to read (or reread) The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. Ground rules: we are not reading for the history of 1848-1852 France, but we're also not looking for direct parallels to the contemporary US. We are looking for broad lessons on politics and just generally good lines.

"People using LLMs basically used less of their brains. Like, literally less of the neural networks that spark around while we think about stuff. Which, to me, sounds … efficient?" I was laughing, and then it just gets more and more depressing.

This allows me to post my worst ever dad joke: Why does Michael Gove dislike Iran. Because it has both an Assembly of Experts and a Guardian Council.

I originally parsed this as “AI Tony Blair”, to which of course one can only reply: “Could anyone tell the difference?”

Many apologies for the lengthy interruption to this thread, due to recurrence of plague and a pile of other commitments. It will resume shortly.

Reinventing conferences: Rather than selecting the papers and panels you’d be vaguely interested in, you select the people you’d like to hang out with (choice between ‘regularly’ and ‘one-off encounter’), and a conference programme is constructed to accommodate everyone’s preferences.

20% of the IP in my latest project is in fact owned by Vocation Brewing of Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. thesphinxblog.com/2025/09/23/i...

The novels of Anthony Powell, and game pie.

ICYMI: Part One of my thoughts on how the “free speech culture” movement contributed to the moment of historical censorship www.popehat.com/p/how-free-s...

It’s not like a slim majority of the UK electorate hasn’t been persuaded to vote for something like this before, cratering economy and all…

The “Debate Me Bro” Grift: How Trolls Weaponized The Marketplace Of Ideas Among the attempts to create hagiographic eulogies of Charlie Kirk, I’ve seen more than a few people suggest that Kirk should be respected for being willing to talk to “those who disagree with him” as a sign that he was…

Meanwhile in Downing Street:

Well *I* deleted my academia dot edu account back when everyone else thought they were cool.

"Anyone who works in manuscript studies or philology knows that these are thoroughly digital disciplines. ... Accusations of technophobia ... would therefore be completely inappropriate. It is precisely our technical literacy ... that must make us critical." @dehypotheses.bsky.social

An actual quote from the Secretary of State for Business and Trade Too often people go to university to ‘explore research and knowledge’ Look forward to Wes S saying 'too often people go to hospital to have operations' or Heidi Alexander saying 'too often people go to the station to catch a train'

True enough. www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

I am trapped underneath an elderly, very grumpy cat who is milking post-op sympathy for all it’s worth.

Okay, if I’d known that the ‘Advanced Dungeons and Dragons’ episode of Community had been taken off air, I would have been all in on “cancel culture has gone too far!” five years ago; it’s a work of genius, and that is STUPID. h/t @drfarls.bsky.social www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/09/on-c...

A productive day: four jars of quince jelly, a tray of cotignac, a gallon of cider fermenting and five gallons of apple juice to be bottled tomorrow. Writing? Erm…

Unlike GenAI, I *know* why I don’t know, and it’s often much more interesting than if I did know. thesphinxblog.com/2025/09/17/d...

“It was Homer who suggested we stand in time with our backs to the future, face to the past.” Does anyone happen to know where Anne Carson got this from? It seems to have become an all-purpose, unreferenced claim about “the Greeks”.

"Britain must burn more fossil fuels and bills must rise in order to power the robot that'll fire everyone. How else will I afford my next private island?"

I thought I'd do a grim little thread on a cursed bird. Here it is. It doesn't know it's cursed, and it isn't it's fault, but it is.

This is genuinely (academically) dystopian — Kings featuring a lecturer who has to mark 100 scripts in a fortnight (!) and presenting AI as the approved workaround to that problem. This is why we can’t let this stuff into our working practice…

Trust us. www.sciencealert.com/openai-has-a...

A Substack from me, addressing the consequences of the Tommy Robinson movement last weekend. We probably won't see more marches on that scale this year. What will happen, though, is a huge boost of energy for Farage and Reform davidrenton590934.substack.com/p/tommy-robi...

Calling peoples' employers in a rage because their tributes to Robert Redford weren't horny enough

Unsurpassable; the most mixed metaphor of all time: “to defame with a partisan spear rather than report with an authentic looking glass.”

Another Tory has joined Reform, so ball is back in Labour’s court for another resignation.

Another data point for the association of the Fall of the Roman Empire with contemporary anti-refugee rhetoric.

No, ChatGPT is not the NPC wizard from whom you can buy a spell scroll to complete the task... thesphinxblog.com/2025/09/14/w...

Hug a Hoodie. So long as it’s a Unite the Kingdom hoodie.

I think Musk's comments to a rally of 100k people are the highest profile advocacy of political violence in the UK since the end of the Northern Ireland conflict. Does anybody have a counter-example? "Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die."

Me, with some worries about the signs of the re-emergence of the US street right davidrenton590934.substack.com/p/charlie-ki...

Elon Musk speaking at a far right rally today, claiming to speak for a British people that increasimgly hold Elon Musk in contempt, across every political perspective outside the far right, owing to his wrecking of Twitter + boosting of racism + rioting + hatred

One of the quiet joys of having a GPS tag on the youngest cat is watching him accelerate when it suddenly starts to rain.

I’m sticking to the idea I posted here a year or so back: the best analogy for working with LLMs is demonology. “Embrace provisional trust”? At best you’re going to get burned.

Some of the high quality content Zuckerberg’s platform is algorithmically shoveling into the brains of American consumers. This story is 100% made up, in case that wasn’t obvious.

a little bit of good natured blog beef, in which I say that @beenwrekt.bsky.social and @leifw.bsky.social are more right than wrong about the state of polling, contra @andrewgelman.bsky.social backofmind.substack.com/p/you-cant-t...