UK government visa changes are “driving universities towards a cliff edge”. www.scotsman.com/education/so...

When Nottingham, Exeter, and Glasgow are making cuts, the entire sector is dying. Well done to successive governments for killing one of the few sectors that combines local economies and global influence.

Yep, any government that makes it harder for my migrant-ridden family ever to consider a return to the UK is simply drawing a very clear, thick line for me before I even consider anything else

As a migrant, I affirmatively do not care how much you spend on schools if you put Shabana Mahmood's immigration policies into practice. This is a logical and calculated stance that I am tired of pretending is somehow irrational.

Same. I am from an immigrant family, marrying an immigrant, teaching immigrant students. It is *incredibly* hard for me not to see Mahmood's policies as a central and vicious betrayal of core values. This combined with Starmer's own rhetoric on the matter thoroughly disillusioned me on them.

SCOOP: In early June the European Commission unveiled its Tech Sovereignty Plan, which emphasized their commitment to #OpenSource. Just recently, they migrated their main ATproto accounts to #WSocial, a for-profit network that has quietly gone closed-source. blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-pub...

Today is the tenth anniversary of Jo Cox's murder by a white supremacist on her way to a surgery in Birstall in her constituency whose ethnic diversity she praised in her maiden speech to the Commons. Her murderer shouted "Britain first" as he shot and stabbed her to death.

Braitenberg Vehicle day with Hugo Marques at QABVR: wire light, touch, and distance sensors to a pair of motors, then tune the sensor gains and motor outputs to play follow the leader

One of the obvious problems with a under-16 social media ban is that it won't work. (60%+ of Australian under-16s are still using these platforms). But it will make people feel like something has been done so they won't tackle the content, which is the real issue.

Plainte pour viols sur mineures : juillet 2013. Ouverture d'info : juin 2014. Première audition du mis en cause : juin 2015. Mis en examen et placement sous CJ : mars 2018. Mars 2022 : MEX pour viols sur une 3e mineure. Janvier 2026 : procès et condamnation à 18 ans.

France 5 diffusera "Persepolis" demain soir à 21h05, en hommage à Marjane Satrapi. Rest in power 🕯️

Everything about this sucks. What a tremendous loss. May she rest in power 💪🏻

"Even if the Microsoft Office team employed a philosopher who said you shouldn’t be so certain, because consciousness is not well understood, that would not be sufficient reason for you to take this idea seriously." www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

i think a certain "i dislike putin but" type of not-even-necessarily-outright-communist person basically thinks that it is value neutral whether or not vilnius is run from moscow. i not only disagree, i think you will find my entire people are willing to /die/ to disagree

Throwback to when a TV station in Iceland accidentally aired an episode of Teletubbies with subtitles from the Sopranos 👌🏼

Epic words and epic insight from Peter Jukes: Social Design Agency, run by Ilya Gambashidze… The objectives were explicitly electoral… a key performance indicator for Germany: success would be achieved if the AfD polled at 20%; a parallel paper set 20% for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France.

"In September 2025, nine mosques and cultural centers in and around Paris were targeted...Bloody severed pig heads, each marked with the word “Macron” in blue ink, were left outside their front doors." This was a Russian stunt. From @occrp.org Read more: www.occrp.org/en/investiga...

I think it is unbelievably messed up that the Labour Party asks us to believe that in their ranks of hundreds of MPs they can't find a single person capable of doing the job and as such have to do an absurd little game to parachute back into Parliament someone who they previously said should not run

give me an enki bilal cyberpunk game

It's "an institution that's driven by financial targets ... leadership isn't interested in research & doesn’t understand teaching" "...despite slogans, it's not committed to either Edinburgh, Scotland or UK" Forensic, devastating from Prof Paterson www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/...

Perfect time for @pimlicat.bsky.social to send me these images, as we record a @quietriotpod.bsky.social on a topic which is, really, the umbrella question for many other topics: "Why are we so rubbish at building stuff?" The original HS2 £37bn plan vs its current £102bn version.

Any UK government that undermines the ability of cities outside London to sustain strong links to other centres of the global economy is not serious about boosting the economic strength and cultural capital of England's regions and other UK nations

A Labour government sits paralysed as many of the basic foundations of the UK's strategic competitiveness get stripped away one by one

Birth rates have been declining for hundreds of years. Blaming smart phones for recent declines is nothing more than moral panic at its finest reason.com/2026/05/18/t...

Yep. Whether the reaction to AI is fair or not – if you ask me at more than 300 chars, I have a reasonably nuanced view – the public presentation of LLMs/genAI has made clear their purpose is to enrich the rich at the expense of everyone else. Booing is a moderate response! bsky.app/profile/rinc...

I see Simon Heffer, in Michael Gove's Spectator, is once again repeating his lie that Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech wasn't about race.. I debated Heffer recently (at the Oxford Litfest) - here's what I said. archive.ph/bqKZF

“…hallucinated references disproportionately assign credit to already prominent and male scholars, suggesting that LLM-generated errors may reinforce existing inequities in scientific recognition…” 🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2605.07723

Good decision and statement! 👏👏 "(...) preserving the integrity and reliability of the ACL proceedings is our responsibility and these measures are necessary to uphold the standards of our community and to ensure that the work published remains a credible resource for future scientific inquiry."

We are implementing a similar policy at @arxiv.bsky.social. If there is incontrovertible evidence of LLM slop in a paper, this means the authors did not take the time to read the LLM output and we can't trust anything else in the paper. Penalty is 1 year ban from arXiv followed by...

The real, damning indictment of this government, the true evidence of failure of leadership, is that the Treasury is still making decisions and projections using forecasts that assume the Home Office changes will not happen for them to work. That is why Starmer must go.

FWIW am deeply unimpressed with BBC Scotland's online results tracker - clunky and inelegant. For real detail and insight, @ballotbox.scot is doing the biz ballotbox.scot 👇🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🗳️ #Holyrood26

Well there we go, the SNP win Shetland on a swing from the Lib Dems of 9.9pts. Nobody predicted that!

There's very clearly, right now, in the UK a problem with anti Semitism. There have been a number of attacks, it's a dire situation. Basically no reason has been presented to suppose this is somehow especially the left's fault, or that interdicting leftwing groups or protests will solve the problem.

Seen a few of these, this is one of the best

Rayner’s caught by the combination of misogyny and classism here, I think. Theresa May can have a big glass of white wine at the cricket but if Rayner did someone would take is as evidence she was getting above herself. Gin and tonic is worse (and Tory coded). Don’t drink? Humourless, judgey jag.

And of course

The news I'm getting from the University of Sussex is that the overwhelming majority of the students are delighted and consider it a victory. Maybe the "Office for Students" might like to take the actual students into account.

I’ve been hearing so much anger and disappointment from frontline workers about the BBC investigation into fraudulent asylum claims. One of the most damning responses has come from one of the experts they interviewed, solicitor Ana Gonzalez. It’s really worth reading her response in full:

UK tax is going to be the highest since 1945. But public spending won't increase; in fact most of us will experience a decline in public services. Here's why - in a thread that I'd love to be completely wrong.

Honestly? This whole thing is just like the lull before Covid really hit or Putin invaded Ukraine. People are like 'la la can't hear you' with their hands over their ears. Going around like nothings changed. Those Straits don't open, gravity's gonna hit like Wile E. Coyote falling down that canyon.

Funny isn't it how those who believe in markets seem to think that the average 18 year old is too stupid to make their own decisions? But who then in turn think that the only way to measure a university education is by salary levels received...

My father taught European Studies at a polytechnic. His stories tell of greatest job satisfaction from encouraging students whose decisions to come into higher education were marginal. He'd hate this elitist bullshit dressed up as desperate concern for mis-sold students.

Oh so many folk who talk of opportunity for marginalised young people in the abstract but not the kind that sees them go to university, because evidently they should know their place. An awful discussion without even considering the wider economy.

I am continually asked if VFMs "understand" classical mechanics and my benchmark for this is the venerable newton's cradle. Let's take a look at progress over the last year using Google's Veo models -- a 🧵

If it's a total ban they're after and kids can't even take phones to school then I'd say that was completely irresponsible. When I was a kid we had payphones - which we used to call our parents in an emergency. No such network exists any more and nobody seems to acknowledge it.

This is such bollocks. All primaries and over 90% of secondaries already impose bans. This is policy to placate GB News viewers and completely unnecessary. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

15 minutes; no questions; government got the blame; my department to have 60% of us sacked. Apparently sacking us will lead to a ‘new, improved’ curriculum. No voluntary scheme, straight to selection and legal minimum redundancy payment.

At Scottish Labour Conference in Feb 2025, a leadership-backed motion to adopt a transphobic policy on single-sex spaces in schools was defeated. Party members and affiliates voted it down. Today Scottish Labour's leadership put that transphobic policy into its manifesto for May's election anyway.