Problem: you have two left wing parties in British politics. Solution: start a new left wing party to unify the movement Problem: you now have four left wing parties in British politics

For a Friday afternoon. (Robert Garioch, October 1961)

21 thoughts on Wikipedia today, finally completed (unlike Wikipedia today)

21 thoughts on Wikipedia today, finally completed (unlike Wikipedia today)

In academic writing it is vitally important to know when you have said enough to prove your argument. It is at this point that you must add every single other piece of evidence you have come across

New issue of my newsletter: "The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition" — One of the hardest problems in digital humanities has finally been solved, and it's a good use of AI newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

arXiv announcement last month: we get so many LLM-generated review papers we've stopped taking that type of submission entirely. blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/a... arXiv paper today: good news, here's a tool to write them even faster arxiv.org/abs/2511.17689

y'know, if tech companies weren't so fired up to call every single thing "AI" it would be a lot easier to distinguish "ML spam filter that is well-sandboxed and tuned on your emails" from "giant context and IP-eroding foundation model that makes people paranoid and unhappy"

"St Benedict repairs a Broken Colander through Prayer", fresco, 1502, by Giovanni 'Il Sodoma' Bazzi. Yes, that's the subject. Yes, that's his name. Yes, the central figure with a sword, expensive robes, and badgers on a leash is a self portrait.

Eight Days is a fantastic, Hugo-winning podcast, & this episode features me as special guest! Becca and Emily are the smartest people around, & kindly invited me to talk about my fave, The Lives of Christopher Chant, & also bureaucracy, & colonisation of mind, & a bit about cricket. do check it out.

The future, invariably stupider than we could ever predict

I am by no means a prominent public intellectual, but my inbox is increasingly filled with messages from people who have been convinced by sycophantic chatbots that they have discovered revolutionary theories that entirely upend our scientific understanding of the universe.

“But the most absurd & preposterous of all… was one started by an unknown adventurer, entitled ‘A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is’” —Charles Mackay (1814–1889) on the South Sea Bubble, in Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds

Preacher outside King's Cross coming up with an exciting new theology - "if you celebrate Christmas you are shaming the name of Jesus" I think he was disputing the accuracy of the 25th as the date rather than going for full-on Puritanism, but who knows

Oh, *now* they admit it

I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight www.cityam.com/the-british-...

back again to share a new preprint from me and @mantzarlis.com! “What did Elon Change? A comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia” arxiv.org/abs/2511.09685 I had seen many spot analyses of individual grokipedia pages, but I was curious: how was grokipedia made? what did Elon change from wikipedia?

Interesting numbers here on the profit of a Twitter account scam: 130 accounts hacked, gaining around $110k. One in ~800k people who saw it fell for it and paid up, averaging $260 each www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

What's available online from the British Library? This guide lists resources including digitised books at Google Books, items from the Endangered Archives Programme, International Dunhuang Programme and the Qatar Digital Library https://bl.libguides.com/currently-available

Minor delays due to trespassers on the line

Today's odd footnote: a tiny neutral condominium on the Belgian-German border, drawn up in 1816 to avoid conflict over a mine, finally abolished at Versailles. (After the mine ran out they tried to run the economy on stamps, gin, gambling & ... Esperanto?) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral...

those modern London ways of living with their fancy coffee (1955 edition)

"...well, we like to think of it as really more of a Second *Suggestion*..."

My phone somehow cached a copy of the BBC News homepage in March and likes to display it when I don't have signal. If it wasn't for Carney, I'm not sure I'd always realise.

Key points in new Cornell Tech research: 56% of Grokipedia entries carry the Wikipedia CC license, suggesting wholesale ingestion Grokipedia’s top 100 sources include fewer news outlets and more UGC (e.g. LinkedIn scraping) Grokipedia has fewer citations overall, making it harder to check sources

Every ad now

It is crazy that there is no testing or licensing regime for these things, dozens of deaths later. A drug which had such serious mental side effects would have been withdrawn instantly

Hamish Henderson (1919–2002) – poet, soldier, intellectual, activist, songwriter – was born #OTD, 11 Nov. A hugely important figure in Scottish culture, Henderson fought in WW2. A 🎂🧵 There were no gods and precious few heroes… —“Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica” #poem #poetry #RemembranceDay 1/10

The automated problem factory!

The company that does this is valued at a billion dollars, incidentally, what an excellent allocation of resources www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Here we see the rare feral phone, resting after shedding their old cases. Vulnerable after a moult, they only emerge in darkness.

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Frame this and hang it in the oh wait

arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review. This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month. Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.

‘Study after study shows that students want to develop these critical thinking skills, are not lazy, and large numbers of them would be in favor of banning ChatGPT and similar tools in universities’, says @olivia.science www.ru.nl/en/research/...

Image of the Sun. Taken at night. Not looking up at sky but down through 8000 miles of rock to the other side of the Earth. Not with light but neutrinos.

But gin the auld fowks’ tales are richt An’ ghaists come hame on Hallow nicht, O freend o’ freends! what wad I gie To feel ye rax yer hand to me Atween the dark an’ caun’le-licht? —Violet Jacob, “Hallowe’en” (COUNTRY LIFE, 1920) Jacob’s son, Harry, was killed at the Somme in 1916 #Halloween #poem

The speedy gleams the darkness swallow’d; Loud, deep, & lang the thunder bellow’d: That night, a child might understand, The Deil had business on his hand… —Robert Burns’s “Tam o’ Shanter”, read by Hamish MacDonald; illustrations by Gary Welsh Happy #Halloween! #C18 www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAqV...

21 years ago today I thought, huh, looks interesting, and created a Wikipedia account. Things sort of snowballed from there. It's been fun. 21 thoughts on Wikipedia, in no particular order: 🧵

I've written a couple of things over the last days about how the government and much of Westminster remaining on X as the platform becomes increasingly toxic is having consequences for our politics...

He telt us his wife had run aff wi Super Mario. Noo, he wis dinin on the dustbins, dwinin awa for want o a pouer pill and a braw sheenie cherry… —Amy Jo Philip, “Pac-Man’s Last Stand” in DOUBLE BILL (Red Squirrel Press 2014) 🟡 🍒 👻 #PacMan #poem #retrogaming www.redsquirrelpress.com/product-page...

If, like so many people, you've found yourself captivated by the exploits of our crack team of librarians, applications for the House of Commons Library Open Day are now open. Why not pop along and see them in their natural habitat? bsky.app/profile/clai...

www.wired.com/story/elon-m... "Elon Musk's Grokipedia Pushes Far-Right Talking Points"

For #EssexDay Philip Salmon's post on the unusual 'freedom-by-marriage' franchise includes material on the Essex borough of Maldon, where wives were interviewed before their husbands could exercise their right to the vote: victoriancommons.wordpress.com/2023/12/04/m...

I read Bede's Ecclesiastical History during the lockdown, and one of the things I thought was so excellent was the way he begins by emphasising that the thing you really need to understand about England is that it's really far North, so it's dark all the time.

Trying today to remember the name of the twitter account that used to do surreal tube announcements - TLF updates, apparently - and some googling turned up this bizarre Reddit snippet. ...no, it's not on the linked page

Delighted to know that Browning said "me own" and "all me life". apropos, back before twitter went crap I did a long run of Recordings Of People Whose Voices You Never Expected To Hear. Maybe time to resurrect the thread...

X is not only completely out of control, it is also increasingly dangerous.

The home of the O'Donovan family is being used as a polling station in Coolmoyne, Co Tipperary. Around 250 people are eligible to vote at the house and after they cast their ballot, they will be treated to a cup of tea, a slice of apple or rhubarb tart, or a scone | More: rte.ie/b/1540324