Happy birthday David Attenborough, and what a lovely day for it with absolutely nothing else happening in the news.

Not now, near-unkillable fungi in space.

Caught out by photographic ID requirement for local #ukelection. What a pointless piece of legislation.

A researcher spent two years documenting what AI is doing to the way humans think. His conclusion fits in one sentence. AI is standardizing human thought. Across societies. Across cultures. Across generations. Simultaneously. At a scale no technology in history has ever achieved.

“I write to peruse myself” - Georges Perec

I wish the writers of this timeline would stop nakedly ripping off the plot of #industry.

Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it. www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-...

I’m just sad that the first conscious AI had to meet Richard Dawkins as a representative of the whole human race. We could have done better than that, I demand an inquest…

Well there’s a story.

some pretty decent philosophy of mind in there too if you're into that kind of thing flux.community/matthew-shef...

ok this is a very good headline

"Instead of highlighting his time as Darth Vader, we will only teach Anakin’s profound redemption, sacrificing himself to defeat Palpatine and prevent the Emperor from ever rising to power again. For a period of time, that is." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

Spotted in Southwark last week #1: a lot of you need this one

For decades it’s been well understood that learning by doing is essential. If you are not doing the thing—writing the essay, solving the math problem, reading the book—you aren’t learning. Public education should not be all about learning to use a company’s products.

The most bizarre #wildlife half-hour. Earlier this evening, I said to Helen ‘I wish I could actually see one of the owls rather than just hear them. We’ve heard them where we live for ten years. Never seen one. Then one hops on a roof above our garden, hooting away.

Interesting, depressing story on being an indie music label in 2026. www.theguardian.com/music/2026/m...

Morning, breakfast fans.

Nerd alert: In Our Time on #r4today at 9am on Cybernetics.

May we have all have the tenacity of a blood donation service chasing a donor who has O Neg neonatal-approved blood. Lads lads lads, I’ve booked for next week, I was just in a meeting… #giveblood

These jokes write themselves.

Delightful discussion on the comeback of #cinema on #r4today. Funnily enough, my BA dissertation was ‘An econometric evaluation of the demand for cinema 1959-1995’. Across that period, the data showed that more home technology offering cinema-like environment (colour TV) obviously hurts cinema…

"[LotR] is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine… [the use of] external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents—or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world…" —JRR Tolkien

A firecrest on the pre-work dog walk. #birds #ukwildlife

On grafting apples and technological parallels. I mean, basically an excuse to share facts about things like extreme heterozygosity, and a picture of the first leaves coming on the apple trees I’ve grafted. buttondown.com/artefacts/ar...

Bragging about how many tokens you’ve spent on a new single serving app that’s only useful to you has all the properly tulip-feels about it.

Been watching old films with the 16yo boy. Interesting what’s aging well, and not. Based on his reaction… The Matrix - aged well Fight Club - aged badly Twelve Monkeys - aged well

Watching Sunshine again for first time in years. What a cast. Murphy, Byrne, Evans, Wong, Yeoh, Sanada, Strong…

Firecrests are the best bird and I’ll hear nothing more about it.

claude design babeyyyy. i still don't understand why you would put an immense amount of money and prompting into a tool that produces mediocre derivative drivel when you could just buy a $50 template and get the exact same result. this anthropic psy-op is wild.

Design as a Demonstrator. Show the thing, change the thing. smithery.com/2026/04/22/d...

“I stopped using my ambient scribe not because it was broken, but because I began to understand, with increasing unease, what it was doing to the consultation I had spent twenty years learning to conduct.“ #cognitivedebt Fascinating account from a doctor. benngooch.substack.com/p/i-was-an-e...

Sometimes you buy something in a shop just for the pure shock value. I mean… what even are these? Me and the lad are about to find out. Italians everywhere are no doubt horrified.

What a cracking show The Lowdown was.

The hedgehog hole we cut into the perimeter wall a month ago continues to bring in spiky friends.

I’ll never forget watching The Wicker Man with my outer Hebridean mum. “I just don’t know where there got all that wicker from”

What a place to hit pause on a video.

I feel the people making this argument have asked ChatGPT to make an argument for them and that’s what it came up with.

🤖 | NEW REPORT: The UK risks a full-blown AI techlash unless the government shows who actually benefits. Our new report sets out a plan to make AI work for the public, not just big tech. Read here: www.ippr.org/articles/acc...

After #r4today we’ll have “In Our Time” on MC Escher, starting just after 9, and continuing endlessly.

"free childcare, cleaner streets, safer neighborhoods"

Wrote a quick guide and checklist for those leaving Substack. Come to my free event tomorrow and we'll talk through it www.paidnewsletterplaybook.com/how-to-migra...

the bubble is so ready to burst

This is stunning.

new evergreen money stuff with matt levine just dropped

You know I knew that Door Dash woman looked familiar

“Basic income has been shown to reduce health care costs, including an 8.5% reduction in hospitalizations. As Dr. Danielle Martin [the newly elected Liberal MP in today’s by-election] has so pointedly said, “If we discovered a drug that reduced hospitalizations by 8.5%, we’d put it in the water.”

“What if he hadn’t had a ponytail, and just had normal hair?!” Steve Bruce on TalkSPORT 🤣 #MUNvLEE #premierleague

Friendly reminder that we can just…ban these. Just like we can ban abusive AI, data centers and mass surveillance. This stuff isn’t inevitable, we can decide we simply don’t want things that are antisocial as part of civil society.

“As well as his own recent thinking on company strategies…” Like blowing $70bn on the Metaverse? I mean, sure Jan.

This new pope seems rather powerful.