Chinese robots are blowing my mind

It was an absolutely baffling decision to ask for strike action - it was doomed to fail and it worsens the negotiating position. It is a genuine shame. Not that long ago the union looked strong. This is a real failure of leadership.

There are still gems to be found online. At the weekend I found the David Rumsey Historical Maps Collection www.davidrumsey.com Lots and lots of maps to browse

My econ lecturing buddies don't tell any tales like this. Issues are 1) restructuring assessment back to exams to cope with ChatGPT 2) making best use of face to face lectures when, as a legacy of the pandemic, there is an archive of online video lectures.

Some of the replies to this thread get a bit tied up around AI, but I don't think it's the core/only issue. How do you learn agency when you can fill every waking moment with an endless scroll of mindless entertainment that is designed to addict? Add in the pandemic and you get this. 1/

Sigh. All the stuff I read growing up. Asimov turns out to be a groper, Clarke a pedophile and Heinlein I stopped reading after 'Time Enough for Love'.

Arizona State Uni opening up in London. That's a big thing london.asu.edu

After a bit over a month, I've written a new blog post! This time on Anthropic's new suggestions for managing context windows with Claude Code clune.org/posts/anthro...

Ok. We're done. AGI is here. '2025-final-v2' just needs to become '2025-final-v2-fixed'

This is very impressive - serious mathematicians seeing real gains from LLMs in research. Via @brendannyhan.bsky.social I haven't linked the original thread because the comments are so wrong ('they can't be using LLMs' etc)

the math doesn't even pencil out. there are ~10^24 stars in the sky. ~10^11 humans have ever lived. if everyone who ever lived on earth had a pocket universe in which every star was inhabited by earthlike civilization, that would be ~1 trillionth the number of ppl Grok would kill to save Elon Musk.

I've reached the point on an almost-entirely vibecoded project where I need to do some major architectural refinement. Some thoughts...

Can anyone recommend me a good RSS reader? I've been using The Old Reader after Google Reader died, which is basically a clone of Google Reader, but it seems abandoned now. I want: 1) Web based 2) Keyboard shortcut heavy. Ideally Google Reader shortcuts as the muscle memory is real

Survey research has been in a downward spiral for decades: LLMs are administering the coup de grâce. As someone who’s spent much of their working life using surveys … Gulp. As I keep saying, many bad things happen when the price of custom plausible bullshit falls through the floor.

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

More on Gemini 3 and reading historical documents. With a line to make Gary Marcus hop. Google does seem to be proving that just scaling LLMs is still working generativehistory.substack.com/p/the-sugar-...

If this analysis from EpochAI is correct then a) model training costs (financial and environmental) are ~5-10x the final run and b) inference costs (financial and environmental) are smaller than assumed I'm making heroic assumptions for a). No-one outside OpenAI can answer properly

I'm on a train to London using AI to reformat and summarise messages from Epstein to Steve Bannon about Macon having a boyfriend. The 2020s are wierd Prompted by today's @garbageday.email

Using transcription of historical handwriting as a test for general intelligence. Also a new Gemini model is coming

I am very taken with this argument, but I'm not sure anyone is ready for it - teach without LLMs and push heavily for LLMs in practical work but let the companies do most of the heavy lifting The obvious counter is that it's stepping away, but unis will still have to embrace AI for research

Age yourself with gaming

I now understand where Elon gets it from. The whole thread is great

Two new posts about MCP and context engineering that seem very linked 1) Anthropic suggesting "Code Execution with MCP" but don't give examples www.anthropic.com/engineering/... but then I also came across 2) replacing playwright with js scripts mariozechner.at/posts/2025-1... 1/

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

Will be discussing ChatGPT with students this week - decided to populate my sidebar with a couple of silly queries for them to spot when I share the window. Have to say it knocked this one out the park - particularly point 2.

This is even worse than the headline makes it seem

ladies and gentlemen...we got him

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

I did actually take a moment to check this rather than getting the joke. Which says a lot about something - either about me or the world!

Today's reminder that the internet has some very, very weird people on it and they will do bad things with your app

Begun the document wars have No, seriously. www.scmp.com/economy/chin...

I wrote up my notes on creating Claude Code plugins This is a very powerful system indeed. Still got some rough edges around installation/removal

Reposting this, because I found this short article an encouraging model of how one academic discipline is proactively engaging AI and reshaping it for disciplinary needs.

Interview with the CEO of Google Cloud on AI and agents. He gives yet another definition of agents but also takes about “Office”, “O365” and “Outlook” while not mentioning Google Workspace once. Workspace is part of his empire.

I have two free hours on a train, so I'm using it to learn about SAP ABAP via Claude. I must have been bad in a previous life but I'm quite enjoying the crazy mix of COBOL, SQL and Pascal syntax and random German v English words

The tl;dr of this article is that Peter Theil is fucking weird. But also we should take it seriously - he has an driving philosophy and is in a position to make it happen The antichrist is the rationale for creating the ultimate surveillance state, rooted in elite superiority

"Make Argentina Gold Again" - this post only sets out co-incidence (by it's own admission) and I'm not totally sold, but it is quite the set of links between Trumpworld, Tether and Milei Even if this is 2+2=5, it's a good reminder that Tether is both sketchy af and deeply linked to Trumpworld

Okay so let's talk through this: 1. He's 80 years old. He doesn't know how to embed a video. So this was likely a staffer. 2. Why would a staffer post this? It's likely just chum for his base, since traditional media has given up on even covering him. 3. That's arguably worse than him posting it.

The logic is irresistible - med beds must exist because otherwise q breaks down. Lit crit as the new essential life skill and AI generated slop for ever

How not to illustrate the similarity of bone structures between humans & horses.

I'm at an ERP event for a big German ERP provider and their UK partners. ERP is not exciting, but the keynote went big on "hyper", "lightspeed", "10x automation" and that we should "calculate our hyperdrive jump". The presenter was wearing an astronaut suite. Argh!

Some really, really good news on solar. Solar and batteries are getting very cheap indeed, and can be built at massive scale.

This is real and I need to have a lie down

We all need to be having these conversations.

I’m as centrist dad as it gets. Big fan of both sides-ism. I’m not voting for this bunch again until they have a complete change of leadership and a backbone implant

More things to lighten the day - "If Silksong was made by Ubisoft" youtu.be/j76qWVIW_FQ?...

Tom Stafford (@[email protected]) on distributed peer review I didn't know that astronomers already use this to allocate time on telescopes

In a grim week, this really did make me laugh.