Yes! Someone made the Blue Labour parody memo!

Ben's description of the memo as "what would happen if you asked ChatGPT to write a mildly parodic memo based on the collected works of John Gray, Maurice Glasman, and below the line comments at the Telegraph" was funny enough that it had to be done. Result: computergrump.pika.page/posts/didnt-...

NEW Six concerns about public procurement What is wrong about public procurement - and why it can be hard to do anything about it Detailed post by me: emptycity.substack.com/p/six-concer...

cant.stop.laughing

As the light broke through the darkness. Photo taken this morning taken on my way back down Glastonbury Tor.

This. We don't have to imagine it, we can look at the US. Masked, jack-booted thugs disappearing whoever they don't like. This is a thing of military dictatorships and it *must not* happen in the UK.

This tiny clay tablet from around 1500 BCE gives a curious account of two medical problems that struck people in their sleep. The first is a mid-sleep nosebleed on the 25th day of the month Ayyāru (around April/May). “During my sleep, blood ran out of my nose.” 📷 K. Wagensonner

Well this is terrifying. I wonder how much of the UK government's bizarre right-wing Reform-chasing it explains, if they've been marinating in it as well.

Every day in every way, passwords are getting worse and worse

A few days ago, a friend asked me to make a FB group for our friend circle planning a tea party. I made the group and invited six people. SIX PEOPLE. It's for a tea party, at someone's house. ... wait for it ... (AI slop post 1/ ?)

Removing Andrew from line of succession opens up a paradox at the heart of our constitution. We supposedly have a hereditary monarchy. But if it were a genuine hereditary monarchy, this chap would now be reigning: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_v... In fact, parliament controls succession.

A new study shows that the choices we make in the next decade will determine #Antarctica’s fate for centuries 👇 pml.ac.uk/news/scienti...

And for the weekend Financial Times I put my public procurement hat on to set out - from a close reading of public domain documents - why the Palantir contracts with MoD are so concerning. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

This is presumably just straight-up illegal. Think twice before advertising on Tiktok, I guess.

Matt Goodwin says the quiet part out loud (again). Reform have been courting the unions? The same Reform who talk about wanting a British DOGE, slashing the regulations that keep us safe like Trump and wanted Singapore-on-Thames? Union members aren't stupid. #TradeUnions www.ft.com/content/871b...

Sigh. Um. How easy is this poisoning for code? Can you write fifty junk blog sites that say that you solve this common coding problem by using this trojan library, and a week later half the world is in your botnet? I feel like the window where you can trust AI to write code may be... brief.

I really believe this. As I've said before, I believe a lot of our turn to fascism is, in fact, nilhism. Part of that is not realising how good we have it: by the standards of the average person in, say, 1900 we've built a utopia. We should celebrate that way more.

This makes so much sense. Can we please just do it? As I have noted elsewhere, NASA's expected budget to return to the moon is about 2/3 the budget for HS2. It should not cost half again what it costs to go to the moon just to get from just outside Birmingham to just outside London. Fix planning!

This. We cannot fix everything, unfortunately, not quickly. We spent too long both destroying our own economy (hello, Brexit) and running down the public sector. What we need are politicians who will be honest about this and about what they stand for fixing now and what for leaving for later.

The Space Shuttle Endeavour silhouetted by an orbital sunset as it approaches the ISS. As the Sun is fully behind the Earth, the Earth is a silhouette, but the atmosphere is able to scatter light around the planet. This is why it's not completely dark immediately after sunset. (1/5) #Astronomy ⚛️🧪🛰️

Updated climate indicators graphics, now including 2025 ed-hawkins.github.io/climate-visu...

Uh... I'm not at all sure that the solution to Iran's repressive government is to restore the conditions (created by the US last time as well!) that led to the Islamic Revolution in the first place. They could... try actual democracy? #Iran www.ft.com/content/ffc9... via @financialtimes.com

It’s depressing to see how well propaganda works😫 People on X and now out in the real world GENUINELY believe that this is all because of Muslims🤦🏼‍♀️ There hasn’t been a single case anywhere of Muslims in this country trying to ban dogs or trying to limit what anyone does with their dog Yet… 🧵 1/14

For the love of... Guys, your president is actually functionally senile. I'm not being insulting, he just is. He can't speak or reason coherently and he's even losing his ability to string a coherent threat together. Can you please just get on and do the 25th Amendment thing already?

Anyway I'll be writing to Reform later to demand that they let me speak at their conference on the main stage. If they refuse me they'll be showing themselves to be enemies of free speech

Erm... I appear to be in the dark void between "American Progressive Democrats" and "Turkish Progressive Intellectuals". For the avoidance of doubt, I am neither American nor Turkish. I'm going to say that means my follow map is neither a silo nor an echo chamber. But is weird. 😆

We go around the same arguments, century after century. But it does mean that Shakespeare's rebuttal then answers Trump and Farage and their ilk now very well.

As jobs begin to shift with AI, I think there will be increasing numbers of people feeling like Aditya (former CTO Dropbox, early Facebook engineer, etc). People are more psychologically resistant to major changes than you might expect, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy to reconstruct meaning.

This is breaking my brain slightly, but... it does appear to be a good idea. That already exists, it's not a wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-someone-did-this. I appreciate that lots of you Bluesky people already knew this. But I didn't, and I figure lots more of you don't.

For your reassurance, here's the Fallen London AI Transparency Statement and the portion of the Steam page which states that we're making Mandrake by hand. We don't use generative AI. <3

Peter Mandelson is telling the truth on one thing: the idea he was bought for a $4k “bursary” or a $75k gift is ridiculous The real incentive was a post-government payday - one so big he *rejected* a $3–5m-a-year offer And Epstein enabled that payday Here’s the evidence. 🧵

I would just like to note that at these prices the UK could have afforded about 1.5 moon programmes for what it cost to build #HS2. If the US can go to the moon for £70bn why can't we go to Euston for £106bn? www.ft.com/content/a5c6... via @financialtimes.com

I'm baffled by why this is only being investigated as misconduct in a public office. Surely if he deliberately shared protectively marked documents with an uncleared foreigner, that is a breach of the Official Secrets Act? #Mandelson #Epstein www.ft.com/content/d643... @financialtimes.com

I'm sorry but this is straight-up gambling and should be taxed and treated as such, up to and including laws on how companies should treat addicts. From @financialtimes.com www.ft.com/content/8c69...

This is one of my favorite optical illusions, because even when you know specifically HOW IT WORKS, it's still hard to make your brain believe it. The image below is real-world video, but you're being tricked into believing it's an elaborate miniature by the DIORAMA EFFECT. Let's talk about it.

Bulkers aren't normally known for their amphibious capabilities, so I'm assuming Razouk here didn't want to do that...

I've said it already, but I find this graph very unconvincing. There are two spikes in posts about London crime, neither aligns well with monetisation of X posts, and the larger misses it by 18 months. Case of (weak) correlation does not imply causation. Something going on here but it's not that.

The Grammys.

I've noticed a microgenre shift in SF over the last year - or possibly just in the books I've come across. Specifically, a bit of a boom in big concept space opera books working in the Banks/Hamilton ideaspace. Meaning SF that simultaneously delivers a strong action storyline against a backdrop

Ok, let’s do this🙄 We’ll start with an explainer covering: 🕒What is a 15-minute city 🏫What on Earth is going on with Oxford 👽Where the conspiracy theories have come from And then we’ll look at the Telegraph article 🧵 1/25

@aptshadow.bsky.social Have you been guest-writing xkcd? xkcd.com/3199/

Monetisation The advert said MONETISE YOUR FOLLOWERS so he thought he would respond by painting them in the changing light, like waterlilies in a pond.

This, frankly, should be shouted over and over by everyone with a platform who cares about climate change and net zero. IT IS FOSSIL FUELS DRIVING YOUR RIDICULOUS ENERGY BILL, NOT NET ZERO.

AI assistant from @gwr.com everybody. It is, needless to say, impossible to talk to an actual living person, only the moronic AI. Thanks for nothing. #trains #stormchandra

Huh. Sam Altman is going to destroy Oracle as well as his own company. Good job, Sam! (Has Birmingham council managed to make its ridiculous Oracle megaproject work yet? Maybe they should find another provider...)

It'll never happen, but it'd be nice to see...

My son's (UK) secondary school is holding a "Lockdown drill". It's for a range of emergencies, such as a major fire near the campus, but also "An intruder". Students are to remain silent and out of sight. This is clearly an active shooter drill. In the UK. Is this where we are? #UK #education

Discworld QOTD, from Night Watch "Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it."