Oil prices are continuing their upward march. Who knows how much further they have to go?

Sickening is absolutely right. Given the courage it takes for rape victims to come forward, having their confidential counselling recordings shared directly with the twisted perverts who violated them is repugnant. Also, 300 hours of community service for a convicted rapist is derisory.

The willingness of the US lawmakers to tolerate dangerous driving is, I suspect, one of the major reasons that traffic-related deaths per capita are 5.5X that in the UK. We have a lot of cameras, and the only people annoyed about that are dangerous drivers. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

Without naming your job, tell me something you say over and over again at work. “What’s the actual problem you’re trying to solve?”

I’m puzzled why the prospect of petrol prices of £1.50 a litre are causing a panic in the government when I’m pretty sure petrol was at nearly £2.00 a litre back in 2022 without the government doing much about it. inews.co.uk/news/politic...

I'm out of words here

Quite a jump in Brent Crude since Friday…

Sorry I know the world is in a terrible fix but I've been laughing at this for ten minutes now

Some context to the Iranian boat that was targeted by US off Sri Lanka coast Former Indian FM: “US was aware of the Iranian ship's presence in the exercise to which the US navy was invited but withdrew from participation at the last minute”

If much of OSS becomes unmaintained due to lack of funding, it’s hard to describe how bad that would for so many tech companies. The bigger ones could easily adopt some projects, but would they continue to share their updates, given most of them are XaaS vendors so wouldn’t be legally obliged?

This is murder. ICE routinely deposits released detainees far from their home just to be cruel. It’s standard practice. To do this to a blind man on a wet cold winter day in Buffalo is to know you are potentially sending him to his death.

Well, it’s official – the Greens took Gorton and Denton by a decent margin. It’s such a relief that it didn’t go to Reform, and gives hope that Reform’s polling rise in the UK may not be entirely translating into real votes. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cp...

Very unusually high levels of family voting (family members influencing each others votes) at the Gorton & Denton by-election. This is pretty concerning anyway, but especially so in a contest that was expected to be so close. democracyvolunteers.org/major-concer...

Woe, wall of astigmatism be upon ye

Labour deserve to lose this by-election for this brazenly despicable trick alone. Frankly I’d say that even if it meant a Reform win, although a Green win would be much better (or Lib Dem’s, but I don’t think that’s likely in this seat).

This is fun! I love how the Germanic roots of English become increasingly clear as you go back. I could still just about follow the 1200 entry (though it gave me flashbacks of reading Chaucer at school), but beyond that it was a real struggle to comprehend enough to follow the story.

Economist article finds summer arrivals at US airports down 5.5% on 2024. As more stories surface like the recent Guardian one linked below, I rather expect this drop will continue – if ICE will throw you in custody even with a valid visa, no visitor is safe. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

For all the Dads who sign their texts

Listen to this 13 year old who went to her city's council meeting. She had some things she needed to get off her chest

Ukrainian veterans facing Amsterdam crowds with mirrors saying THIS IS WHO WE PROTECT #СлаваЗСУ

Israel has been dumping herbicides throughout southern Lebanon as part of a concerted ecocide campaign to render the region uninhabitable. This has been going on for months with Lebanese journalists & environmentalists regularly reporting on it. The BBC: we don’t know why the Israelis are doing it

I guess it's now illegal to help your spouse pack for a trip. This is some soviet shit

This is why it’s always terrible when standards are adopted which are encumbered by patents. I know it’s not uncommon, but it’s still terrible.

With alt text because people who need screen readers should still be able to access this gem

My colour memory is a 44.5/50. Can you do better? dialed.gg According to the test cards, I’m red/green colourblind. Now I’m not sure I trust the tests…

2026 basically

In case anyone’s interested, I shared some early thoughts on using Claude for coding in the thread from this reply. to;dr: early days yet, but it’s better than I expected it to be. Whether it’s good enough in the long-term remains to be seen, I still have some concerns. But I need to validate them.

An AI agent using OpenClaw had its Github pull request closed because it wasn’t human. github.com/matplotlib/m... So … the agent wrote a blog post attacking the guy who closed it. crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-we...

This is why I drew a line in the sand. The industry wants to turn the browser into a concierge between you and the web, interpreting and filtering your reality. They call it delegation - I call it a loss of agency. A browser should be a tool you wield, not something that makes decisions for you.

Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted child sex trafficker, gets gardening time, sports, therapy dogs, and spa products in prison. Migrant children in custody are sleeping on concrete floors without enough food or clean water. Our priorities are so fucked.

There are some vehicular deaths that are a result of a bad circumstance/minor misjudgement, but there is no way to accidentally drive 96 MPH.

Measles also causes "immune amnesia," meaning it effectively wipes your immune system. Where measles spreads, other viruses soon follow.

This mental image is the funniest thing I’ve imagined I’ve seen for days.

LLMs are in the stage where people treat them as magic. For most tech this is a knowledge transfer issue – use of the tech moves faster than the understanding. But even the creators of LLMs don’t fully understand them, so I wonder if it’s more like when they were putting radium in cosmetics, etc.

A tale as old as time.

NEW What the Palestine Action judgment means - and what it does not mean How the High Court ruled against the government, but not with enthusiasm By me: emptycity.substack.com/p/what-the-p... (A follow up to my Prospect post this morning.)

As you might imagine, the “Abolish Landlords” policy is a complete misnomer. I guess the Green Party have been reading the Michael O'Leary publicity playbook, and figured that the “Mild Reductions in Landlord Profiteering” policy wouldn’t get them nearly so many clicks.

The recent bitcoin rally is looking increasingly like a dead cat bounce. About time that bitcoin’s rampant overvaluation is recognised, in my view.

This sort of thing is a clear signpost that if Reform gain power, they’ll be very much using the same playbook as Trump’s administration in the US.

always so funny to me when people are like “how am I supposed to explain Gay to my kids?” my kid asks me way harder shit all the time. “why did they build the road this way? why are some people bad?” I don’t know. please ask me about Gay

Katsuhiro Otomo, homenagem a Escher

In Boston ICE randomly pulled over this huge white Irish guy with a Mass drivers license, 20 years in the states, legal status, pending green card and have held him for 5 months, his citizen wife paid a $4k bond that was ignored(!) ICE forged his signature on deportation agreement, no appeal

What’s also great is reading the dialogue with Claude where it stops and says “I need to stop and be honest with you about something important” and reveals it deleted every single photo. Software built for dunces

This is exactly the level of budgetary competence that Reform would bring to national government – except there won’t be a higher government which could grant emergency funds. They could get an IMF loan (you know, like developing countries), but it would come on conditions of swingeing austerity.

If you see this, quote with a robot that isn’t from “Star Wars”, “Star Trek”, “Dr. Who”, or “Transformers.”

Post your favorite “lord of the rings” character. Wrong answers only.

Repost with a photo of yours that would make a good album cover.

Gervais’s Law: celebrities should never share their political views except in a sitcom, Netflix comedy special or national arena tour where they can pretend they’re just joking even when they’re clearly not

No matter how much I think I have some vague appreciation of the massive cultural variety of India, facts like this still take me by surprise. Source: An audacious new book about a “precocious” country economist.com/finance-and-... from The Economist