“What’s the UK issue with ID cards?” | …the answer is as follows: Britons… https://alecmuffett.com/article/115209 #DigitalId #IdCards #KierStarmer #UkIdCards #censorship #racism #surveillance

me trying to publish (book, articles, cool monograph and teaching book) publishers:

nice master’s thesis, shame if it were only read for its references

The source of that expert is an AI security company called Undetectable. In reality the attackers used malware detectable by the free version of Windows Defender with static signatures from a decade ago.

12 "top" "academics" that clearly forgot their armies of PhD students and other slaves to write their references for them that day. That or a poorly prompted LLM. Disgrace, but that is par for the course now in the US Courts.

$NVDA investing $100bn into OpenAI so OpenAI can buy chips from Nividia and rent capacity from cloud providers who buy chips from Nvidia? It gained $150bn on this news in market cap, implying an immediate 50% return for shareholders. +50% one-day equity ROIC This is the AI era of new finance.

why did you buy a slop machine if you didn't want slop

Monday of week 2, even!

It feels wild having to consider leaving before I am kicked out. Wild.

Anyone shocked that Reform plan to deport immigrants with Indefinite Leave to Remain hasn’t been paying attention. Next it will be stripping citizenship from dual citizens, then deporting them. Who do you think Reform are? This. This is who they are.

Guess what everyone and their mum told everyone years ago

'Younger students and those with lower prior attainment were more likely to use it in ways that are detrimental to their learning (for example, copying and pasting work without reflection). Research has also shown similar effects of GenAI tools among workers, not just students.'

something which is not a person, and does not have feelings or intelligence, being designed visually in an aspirational, rich- and status-coded way and programmed to say it is hurt, while ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS who don't look or speak nicely are not treated as human. COMEMIERDERÍA

Why is a business secretary even talking about students in the first place (a joke in itself) - and if he likes the US much, move there mate. Sod off, take your rich sheep with you. My students are universally amazing - genuinely been such a great experience!!

There is another country. New post on my Brexit & Brexitism Blog discussing the thuggery, sanctimony and hypocrisy of the last fortnight, and how Starmer should lead in articulating an alternative version of patriotism to that of the far-right: chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2025/09/ther...

📣My analytical op-ed in @ForeignPolicy on AI-powered information warfare. Is the window for combating AI-driven propaganda is closing? Local, open-weight models let State, non-state and micro-operators run industrial-scale influence ops with no central points. foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/18/a...

Finally I can work on all the papers I have to fini.. Oh, reviews, grant reviews, other admin work, hearings (UK, EU, DK), teaching prep, project planning, grant planning for next year. To everyone who is waiting for me to finish my outstanding writing, apologies. By November 🤞, most likely.

Want some free career advice? #AcademicChatter

"We are told that AI is inevitable, that we must adapt or be left behind. But universities are not tech companies. Our role is to foster critical thinking, not to follow industry trends uncritically." www.ru.nl/en/research/...

Oxford University Press is introducing an AI summarisation & quizzing asst. into their law textbook ‘trove’: it took considerable effort from our Fac+Library to have them engineer in a license-level off switch (they initially refused!). They did not clock how important the skill of summarisation is.

Wow.

Love having these guys ruin my roads and other infrastructure further. Hope they find the worst way to punish their voters and the rest of us this time around. 🙃

What this means is that government and UUK want to impose contract changes on vast swathes of academic staff to reduce research time, and ultimately make vast numbers of staff redundant. Join UCU if you are not already a member www.ucu.org.uk/join

My thoughts on this idea:

"Hobbyist" indeed. Wonder what half of my time is paid for then. Maybe this guy has no idea how research funding functions, as with most of these "management"/"leaders" types. Hobbyist tend to know more because they are interested too, so he must just be a plain under-performing lad.

I couldn't help myself.

even in a hype bubble the most looked to firm can’t even imagine a profit for another five years from now and even then it’s just a fantasy one

A German teen told Meta's child safety researchers his under-10 little brother had been sexually propositioned multiple times on its VR platform. Meta deleted the evidence. New internal whistleblower docs indicate that was part of a broader cover-up: www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

We’re excited to share the final programme for the first Hype Studies Conference: (Don’t) Believe the Hype?! 📅 10–12 September 2025 📍 Universitat Oberta de Catalunya 🌐 Fully hybrid & free 👉 Full schedule: hypestudies.org/media/pages/... 👉 All speakers & abstracts: hypestudies.org/media/pages/...

@bylinesnetwork.co.uk While horrible (and anti-democratic, and weak), it shows how powerful you have all become!

With lots of competition, is this the biggest financial waste of Brexit? The figures are eye-watering. I have no knowledge of this, but were European public-procurement procedures still being followed when these went to tender? 1

At least people are taking them to task. I have a paper coming out on this too soon. But it's not a marginal view that this is okay sadly. arxiv.org/abs/2402.019...

lol get their pasty no-chin-having asses

At #SLS to present a paper that is done soon, medical device regulation -> hard law versus soft law in Britain. Will get the paper out in preprint when I have gotten feedback! Mail me on my official email if you want to meet up while I am in Leeds. 🧐

Comparative law debate in American Chopper style

📣AI propaganda factories🏭 are now operational. My study shows how small, open-weight models can run as fully automatic generators in influence campaigns. mechanising personas, engagement, cadence. Possible for State, non-state, and micro-actors, including and bedroom ones.

Where has this ludicrous ECHR "debate" even come from. I've never once met an ordinary member of the public who's said to me, "Do you know what? We REALLY need to leave the ECHR." It's just a new right wing talking point because every other shit idea they've foisted on us has run out of steam.

I can finally write the footnotes in the style of my legal forefathers for this piece - I am sorry my interdisciplinary buddies! Love having 6 lines of intense footnotes at my disposal, per page if necessary!

Ofcom is useless "Given that the law could not be clearer, why is Ofcom muddying the waters? Its arguments are grounded in two different but equally disingenuous approaches: freedom of expression, and audience research."

Keeping us safe from fake #AI pictures means — yet again — different ways to break the legality or security promises of end-to-end encrypted messenger software like @signal.org ; more here:

Rosalind Dixon on "abusive feminism" - as a form of "abusive constitutional borrowing", in which "liberal democratic ideas and forms" are used to erode or undermine "the “minimum core” of democracy".

💥💫 Out now/online first: my chapter Prediction Power as a Challenge for the Rule of Law in The Oxford Handbook of Digital Constitutionalism Link: academic.oup.com/edited-volum...?

Brexit was supposed to draw the sting of discontent with technocracy, globalisation and distant 'elites'. At this remove we can see it didn't, it made things worse. Same with every populist outburst. They thrive on the chaos.

The most inspiring read of my summer. James Bridle’s Ways of Being is a beautiful and thought-provoking essay on the entanglement of humans, nature and technologies, and ideas about what intelligence is and how to build ”smart” machines. #STS #AI

For fancy RF stuff, various industries have been able to get away with kindergarten security protocols because “nobody will ever figure out how to intercept a radio broadcast!!!!” Turns out that’s not true and now those security protocols have to be brought into the 21st century. That’s good!

me recommending major revisions