Anyone who puts forward this argument can neither write nor read.

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

New blog entry: A quiet patch … www.antipope.org/charlie/blog...

What's your favourite Bible verse? (Wrong answers only.) ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn — Book of Dead Names, 2:14

Government apparently more willing to ask people to embrace AI than migrants, for a start, which is just wild.

Reminder: The Guardian, like the rest of the British media, protects and endorses fascist ideology (they just soft-soap some of it in comparison with, say, the Daily Telegraph).

The section that the Guardian censored… By Prof Judith Butler

Well...

Well that's not weird/freaky or anything! https://crestabear.bandcamp.com/album/mirror-shades

1. In a landmark ruling, the Montana Supreme Court has declared that the constitution, one of the most progressive in the nation, entirely protects transgender people. The ruling is even insulated from SCOTUS decisions, due to how state constitutions work. Subscribe to support our journalism.

In case any writers out there have been getting those dodgy ClaimsHero emails . . . news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/judge...

And we know why the AI worker is portrayed as a woman. That's good old fashioned structural misogyny.

honestly very funny to see the line "We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average" in a study paid for by anthropic inc

I am beginning to wonder if much US opposition to the various wars is not an echo of the failure of the Second International, which was wrecked by the First World War.

if there is an impact on the future of software development from llms, beyond "wow, outsourcing to the lowest cost bidder reduces quality and impacts future velocity", it's this query languages, dsls, are pretty much dead in the water. no-one wanted to learn how to use them, even before llms

Péter Magyar, who unseated Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán Sunday in a landslide, shared a bombshell with reporters that the outgoing leader had diverted taxpayer funds to bankroll the American Conservative Political Action Conference. trib.al/ct7GGV3

The term of art for this is "Payola". And it's a crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola

"why were you loitering?" "Well officer I was waiting for the chance to spot a rare example of a 524 diesel engine with twin drive shafts that will be pulling 36 wagons at 17.53 from Cleveleys. There's a funny story attached to the 1963 rollout of the split bogey that I think you'll find amusing..."

Oh gosh, Ian Watson has died. Met him several times and he was witty and erudite. He will be missed.

Well, if they arrested everyone waiting for a delayed train the Delay Repay outgoings would go down AND nobody would dare loiter around stations any more! Sorted!

The name fooled a lot of people. For years, the BBC used Claire Fox as its "leftwing" voice on the Moral Maze, though her positions were clearly extreme right. The line-up was typically: hard right (Melanie Phillips etc), right, centrist and far right. Which is more or less the BBC idea of balance.

A crucial article, but one quibble. I've been arguing since 1997 that Frank Furedi, Claire Fox and the rest of the gruesome "Revolutionary Communist Party" goons were NEVER on the left: the RCP was a far-right front from the outset. No surprise when they started working for Orbán, Farage & Johnson🧵

Putting the awfulness of this aside... I genuinely dont understand who this is supposed to appeal to and why theyve made it so clear. The number of people who this is highly salient to is <5%, most of whom won't ever vote Labour. Its division for divisions sake

I just Sigh Look, we can deal with teenagers and sex by pretending it doesn't happen or we can *checks notes* provide fact based sexual education

I have already heard Hungary's new government referred to as The New Management. I understand it wasn't a @cstross.bsky.social reference but it could be.

This week on #RunawayToTheStars: Talita snaps. Catch up: https://runawaytothestars.com Book funding this month! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ironspike/runaway-to-the-stars?ref=5t13dq

I've been following this webcomic for a while and it's a good'un. Recommended!

This is also a government that is afraid of community gathering, that has been antagonistic to online spaces and that has punitively taxed and restricted cafes, restaurants and other social spaces. Turning up late to say "Oh yes, this makes people unhappy" is not really very helpful.

Also please don't look up how much it costs to build and staff a building.

8m 10-19 year olds in the UK so this is investment of £62.50 each.

£500M is another one of those numbers that sounds big until you divide by, say, "number of people in the UK."

Absolutely. Labour are a bit better, committing £500m and building a bunch of new youth centres, but like you say, this is a consequence of the long-term privatisation of public space and of ahistorical expectations of perfect behaviour.

I am shocked, SHOCKED, that after the Tories closed down all the youth centres and non-commercial public meeting spaces under austerity the teens are going to *commercial* public spaces to socialize and thereby scaring the Daily Mail editorial writers

Those US-Iran negotiations in a nutshell: Iran sent 4 PhDs to Islamabad. The US sent a real estate developer, a son-in-law, a lawyer and a general.

I preferred Robert Charles Wilson's version www.reddit.com/r/printSF/co...

Yes. If it's via Royal Mail, request to view the item before accepting it. If you refuse it then they cannot charge you, but the company can be charged £5 per item for non-paid or underpaid mailings. Never pay, as that is acceptance. Ignore it for 18 days and it's RTS, with a charge to them.

If you're in Scotland, Reform UK is sending election leaflets through the mail without paying the postage! So the recipient pays to receive their grotesque racist spam. Niiiiice. www.reddit.com/media?url=ht... (Source: old.reddit.com/r/Scotland/c...)

World's smallest violin time again! J. D. Vance speaks at election rally for Viktor Orban: Orban loses voters per subsequent polling. https://www.newsweek.com/viktor-orban-hungary-election-jd-vance-rally-11804123

I really enjoy @cstross.bsky.social Laundry Files books on audio. Tbh, recent book is last in series, first in series not so recent.... but very very good...

Scottish tour of the Louvre 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇫🇷 youtube.com/shorts/z0SnX...

“What the hell do the love letters of that old fraud H.P. Lovecraft have to do with the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs?” A slight departure for #NationalUnicornDay – @cstross.bsky.social’s Hugo Award-winning novella “Equoid”, via @reactorsff.bsky.social 🦄 🐙 reactormag.com/equoid/

Imagine the loneliness of a female vamp who's attracted to Christian dudebros and keeps trying to turn one only to have their tattoos make them explode every time.

This is key to political understanding: austerity causes a rise in support for the far right. BTW, austerity is *not over*, unless you accept the meaningless official definition. A meaningful definition is "a decline in public services caused by a shortfall in funding". catherinedevries.eu/NHS.pdf

Obviously (answers in reverse order) they only drink the blood of alcoholics, but they never get that far because in the process of turning vamp their pec catches fire and burns like a magnesium flare that won't go out.

That’s the Kings Arms in Taunton, should you want it on your “never visit” list.

Who could have possibly guessed this would happen

Reminder: Margaret Thatcher died 13 years ago on this date! I propose to raise a toast on her behalf—a G&T, obviously. (And good riddance to bad rubbish.)

credit where due, the panel with trump wanting to carve his face into the moon was inspired by the bit in a @cstross.bsky.social novel where the nazis did this for hitler on a lifeless world in an alternate dimension

Oh, I'm not the only one who takes those pictures, then?

28 years of writing in one picture. :) catiemurphy.com/books for details :)