good god, more checking reveals that Newcastle, Wolves, Bournemouth, Fulham and Burnley are also nervously checking the geoblocks! Just under one third of the EPL are sponsored by gambling firms that aren't licensed in the UK!

Some very interesting if concerning stuff in here (it's particularly striking that the ONS, for all its recent struggles, is the most independent of the ones tested).

@ucl.ac.uk Staff and Students - join us for an Open Access Week webinar in which four speakers will consider the question: Who Owns Our Knowledge? Wednesday 22 October, 11am - 12:30pm 📆 We hope you can make it! 👉 buff.ly/g0vGFc8 (Graphic from Open Access Week website, photo by Greg Rakozy)

"My wife’s phone blew up when we went through some little town and she got some signal. She kind of yelled, 'Oh my god, oh my God.' I was outside and we’re in grizzly territory, and I thought, 'Bear? There’s no bear.' She comes out and says, 'You just won the Nobel Prize.'"

All I could think of on reading this was "everywhere is spelled Ecclefechan and pronounced Kirkcudbright"

"AI slop" seems to be everywhere, but what exactly makes text feel like "slop"? In our new work (w/ @tuhinchakr.bsky.social, Diego Garcia-Olano, @byron.bsky.social ) we provide a systematic attempt at measuring AI "slop" in text! arxiv.org/abs/2509.19163 🧵 (1/7)

today's footnote is Lancelot Blackburne, Archbishop of York 1724–1743, active in the Caribbean in the 1680s, during which he was - let us be clear here, there is no evidence at all that he was a pirate. None. At all. His contemporaries had their doubts, though.

for a brief and confusing moment in 2010 the polls had a three-way tie (approximately). In the next couple of years it's not impossible we'll see a four or even five way one. Bizarre.

Great @reutersinstitute.bsky.social research published today. This on the trust of AI generated search has surprised me. Way higher than I would have assumed. Still striking that billions(?) of people are using search products where less than 50% of people think the first result is good.

In which @jwmason.bsky.social puts his finger on a central contradiction of AI: it’s both a result of free sharing of information online, and a threat to it. jwmason.substack.com/p/actual-int...

This was really interesting www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

The great debate going forward is not about this specific technology (and its enormous energy demands - the debate is also about that) but about the conditions under which people will continue to be able to share the products of intellectual work with each other on the web.

What LLMs are doing, fundamentally, is reaping the benefits of a vast spontaneous, directly social, decommodified decentralized production of use values.

In all the endless discussions of LLMs, there’s a point that is, on one level, obvious, but that I feel does not get sufficiently foregrounded: LLMs are transforming material that people have put up on the internet.

The tragic story of James Tilly Matthews, a former peace activist of the Napoleonic Wars confined to Bedlam asylum in 1797 for believing that his mind was under the control of the “Air Loom” — a terrifying machine which was brainwashing politicians: publicdomainreview.org/essay/i...

Today's historical footnote: Chuny the elephant, minor celebrity of London 1811-1826, when he was killed after either going musth or having a very bad toothache london-overlooked.com/horror/

Reposted with alt text. Also, from a cursory look, this appears to basically be true, which is pretty funny. Philosophers... debate.

The first thing we at @fullfact.org always ask people when they see something online is how does it make you feel? If it seems too good to be true, take a moment and consider if you should post it/say it on a prime time panel show fullfact.org/toolkit/

This is INCREDIBLE. The Bearded Vulture has multigenerational nests that last for hundreds of years, built in very secluded places — and they’re FULL OF ANTHROPOGENIC ARTIFACTS.

no no the publishing industry is doing fine, why do you ask

I read this, got to the third paragraph, scrolled down, scrolled back up, and scrolled down again looking for the bit where they actually took a position.

feels like we're living through some kind of cultural gas leak

In food history, we notice how super-refined foods--gelatin, vienna sausage, white bread--lose class and become horrifying once they become industrialized. Suddenly, fingermarks in bread dough demonstrate skill, not clumsiness. Post-chatGPT, I'm feeling this about writing. Smoothness feels gross.

Spent many (many!) hours pulling legal explanations and apologies from lawyers who were caught using AI that hallucinated in which they explained to a judge why they used AI. The explanations are astonishing and extremely good: www.404media.co/18-lawyers-c...

can't wait to read Elon's new bio on Grokipedia

My grandmother once told me she remembered the first time she saw a plane. Today, I realised I remember the first time I saw the internet. Somehow that's even more disconcerting.

Outside UCL today; I think the largest concentration of rental bikes I've ever seen in one place

On the morning of Keir Starmer's conference speech here's a new post on an odd psychopathology in British politics - our main parties don't like the people who vote for them - the dreaded Professional Managerial Class. And so they are acting out like a divorced dad seeking cooler voters. 1/n

My “the crazy spending of this AI boom isn’t like the dot-com bubble” T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt

The bees have discovered Brutalism

The last couple of days have been dominated by trying to hang a new roller blind. We finally got it up and discovered that ... it doesn't roll. The chain has a safety break that breaks the second you pull it. Amazing.

The Scamocene turned out to be the most depressing epoch to live through yet.

Things I had not expected to see today: Deutsche Bank making a numbers based argument that "AI" is a bubble and won't last https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/deutsche-bank-grim-warning-ai-industry

The point when you decide the news stories are just too silly to try and make sense of comes around quicker every parliament

🧵 Five years ago @yaelrice.bsky.social and I published this so that no one would have to reinvent the wheel of revealing why research like this is so misguided it defies sense. hyperallergic.com/604897/how-s...

Speaking to my students, they don't on the whole _want_ to use LLMs, even if they can get away with it. What tips the behaviour is when they get the impression that everybody else is doing it already. That's what the ads are for.

A footnote that has stuck in my head ever since I read it: Huskisson was not only the first (widely-reported) fatality on the railways, he remained the most prominent one for a long time - somehow most lastingly-famous Victorians involved in a railway accident emerged safe.

I have apparently been walking past the Institute of Physics for years without ever noticing their street number

Well, if it’s 23 September... YES, THAT’S RIGHT! It’s the 71st anniversary of the hunt for the Gorbals Vampire, in which hundreds of children aged from four to 14, armed with dogs, knives and sharpened sticks went looking for an urban myth

This is fantastic fun!

The Hollywood Reporter just published a nice oral history of Ron Howard's Apollo 13 (1995) by @aaroncouch.bsky.social I recommend that all fans of this film read this article, but in the meantime, here are some good quotes. 🖖 1/18

someone sold a series of entirely chatGPT generated articles on invented topics to various magazines; Wired and Business Insider both accepted them and had to retract. pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/d...

I think this is one of the most interesting critical papers on LLMs I have read recently: very much worth your time. doi.org/10.1109/MTS....

26. The French Government spends over €50 million a year paying the salaries of priests and rabbis (aligned with civil service grades) in the Alsace-Moselle region because it wasn’t part of France when church and state separated. Blasphemy law was only repealed there in 2017.

here's an important thing about deterministic tools: when they fail, they fail predictably you can learn how to use them *for your own purposes* because they behave in consistent ways even if they aren't 100% optimal AI tools add a layer of ambiguity so you're 100% never sure what the output means

Eight weeks is a long time in politics, it seems

The answer to this is embarrassing. (and even despite thinking about that, autocorrect had to save me)

I don't think they should have abolished the Not Proven verdict. I think they should have declared that it now had a status that was equivalent to having been abolished, but with a lingering suspicion that it still existed.

A #poem for #NationalFoxDay! 🦊 #fox #poetry Ian Hamilton Finlay FOX see me wan time ah wis a fox an wis ah sleekit! ah gaed slinkin heh an snappin yeh the blokes aa sayed ah wis a GREAT fox aw nae kiddin ah wis pretty good had a whole damn wood in them days hen

Not where I expected that story to end up, TBH www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...