At the risk of stating what should be obvious: sharing potentially illegal images, (or screenshots containing images) because you’re horrified that they exist, or to prove they exist, is STILL SHARING THEM. Do not do it. Protect yourself AND those whose feed your post might cross.

Interesting to see this from the State of California. We could do with a similar state service in the UK - I believe the legislation is in place for personal data deletion, but in practice it's a neverending game of whack-a-mole and you don't know all the organisations that have your data anyway.

Joining the justified pile-on of Reuters. Someone prompted a bot to generate the text of an apology, after someone else prompted it to generate illegal imagery. Those responsible are the prompter and of course X/Twitter. I'd also ask, what imagery was it trained on.

Stupid trolling from the ironically-named US department of Homeland Security of course. Imagine the damage to the US if its population were to be suddenly cut by 30%. Putin would love to see it of course; utter collapse of the US as a global force.

Trump loves to dish out criticism but can’t take it himself. Sanctioning two British citizens is the behaviour of a bully and a blatant attack on free speech. We can’t allow his growing interference in UK and European politics to continue. The Government must stand up to him.

One of the more common defences of generative AI is that, in terms of social harms, it does nothing that was not already possible. e.g., CSAM has long existed; the internet writ large made it easier to distribute, so AI's effect is negligible. But there's a big problem with this line of reasoning.

He's *so* pleased with himself 😁

Pics from yesterday's wander around town - crystal clear day!

TIL that some people make a pig ornament with a lemon, then leave it out to rot for New Year? Never heard of this before. Wikipedia says, "English-speaking countries" but as far as I can tell that just means the USA...

bye 2025👋

🧵The wildly racist ‘sex selective abortion’ conspiracies are being spread. Please help me debunk them with actual evidence. I wrote this for The National recently www.thenational.scot/politics/256...

100% The folly of the household comparison is dangerous. Native link (Zack's is a Twitter/t.co redirect so doesn't look good here) www.ippr.org/articles/eco...

I'm asking John - and indeed all journalists - as a new year resolution to stop comparisons with a national economy and a household budget. How many years have to go by until we can have coherent conversations in the media about the economy? t.co/jIObxTAoeL

Calls to strip pro-democracy activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah of his British citizenship pile torment on top of torture. New piece by me on a dangerous and manufactured storm: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This is going to catch me flack: it's what people who don't know what good writing is think is good writing, and without understanding what makes writing good.

Awesome. Will have to watch for them going on display at the gallery (which is free admission).

The most worthy quest for blue beans, and ultimately blue veggies. (At first glance I thought the pic was a jar of blue smarties.)

Russian troops invading Ukraine are "main obstacle" to peace in Ukraine, says mostly everyone else

Apparently I'm doing this -- my open letter to that open latter about AI in writing and publishing. I emerged from Hibernation Week to write it, so god only knows how much sense it makes. But at least a human wrote it, so that's nice. Bonus: picture of my "cat," sweet baby Boomba.

Bought a tube of Pringles on offer, thinking to test mty willpower - could I eat just a few at a time and not scoff the lot in one go? ... Went as well as could be expected, I guess 🫤

Ho ho ho Some Christmas cheer for you www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This debate over Stephen Yaxley Lenon finding Jesus is hilarious. The Klan were Christians. The Nazis were Christians. Are we having conversations about whether to tolerate them? Hand wringing stupidity is dragging us to hell, not these right wing grifters www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

Reminder that Henry Hoovers are made in Britain by a unionised workforce

"may not be able to pass his business down to his children" is a good thing. Nepotism is not. And remember he's the one who bought up farming also to avoid inheritance tax.

Note the suit itself was about shareholders feeling hard done by due to bad publicity from the data harvesting scandal reducing share prices. They've achieved their goal in spades, by leveraging billionaires fear of having to testify. We get nothing - no light shone on them.

I watched the king's message, then this. They're very similar in their theme: stop being a dick and treat people like people. Then realise that only one political party is actually saying this. #votegreen

Happy Hogswatch to all who celebrate. Ho! Ho! Ho!

Quite something when the Express admits a Green party Christmas message might have more attraction to the UK population than the King's Christmas message. Pathetic small-minded people, the Express writers and editors.

King Charles' unusually outward-looking Christmas message was packed with messages and symbols Closed out by Ukrainian singers with British military musicians, he spoke of "compassion and reconciliation" and the need "to ensure that right triumphs over wrong" www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/w...

Carol of the Bells, in Ukainian dress - a powerful message in the UK King's speech, I think.

Anyone know how Tiny Tim is doing this morning?

Hmm. Seeing image posts where the alt text is just the text of the post rather than a description of the image. Not a good look. It could be attempting to game the "100% alt-text" metric many use as a precondition for sharing.

This is a very good piece; insightful on why e.g. execs have such a rosy view of "AI" and don't understand the resistance to it. I think in the end it still overstates the value obtained even by those who might understand what LLMs are and their limitations, but that's a minor aspect of the piece.

Wildly different things, tasks, techniques, subspecialties being lumped into "AI" and then being conflated with each other, doesn't help. Different types of models vs the techniques to train them vs the tasks they are supposed to accomplish, all under "AI".

A worthwhile long read on AI data center financing. All quite circular - and risky, particularly if some new chip advance elsewhere (Google, Broadcom, AMD mentioned in the piece) that undermines the 5-year value of Nvidia GPUs.

Joyous - 🦖🦕 dinos ftw! 🤠

25 solo albums! Much more than Road to Hell (on the M25/M4 intersection) RIP www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

So much to love about this film. The fandom nerds who have, between them, compiled full schematics of the ship. The (off-camera) tentacle porn. Sigourney Weaver repeating the computer. Grabthar's Hammer.

Galaxy Quest - a perfect movie, just a wonderful love letter to actors, sci-fi, Star Trek in particular, and to fandom - really deserves a proper physical release with decent extras. Think Weaver's right that releasing a R-rated cut would be fun, too.

Good, using Rosen and Allsopp as exemplars, on the difference in attitude between left and right. Personally, I'm with Rosen; that key aspects of society should be fully funded - NHS, schools, travel infrastructure including buses.

Side-thought - someone took their black cat with them to Stonehenge.

terminator 2 is science fiction bordering on fantasy like star wars except instead of the mystical force it's because it implausibly imagined a near future where someone in tech realized their well-funded work on AI would ruin civilization and then he gave a shit

If the data is used as a risk indicator such that it reduces the number of cases to check to 1/50th of the load (ok so far), then HMRC should have had the capacity to check that 2% of cases in depth. That they didn't, but hare-triggered on the unreliable data, is absolutely not ok.

Meanwhile, the UK’s equivalent of the Dutch SyRi scandal (excessive data sharing and surveillance of benefit recipients, resulting in flat-out wrong and occasionally batshit errors) has been met not with government resignations but with a shrug. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

In response to the reappearance of MMT, I have, somewhat reluctantly, written up where the current crop of 'pop MMT' goes wrong. The short version: yes the central bank issues money; no this doesn't change anything. criticalfinance.org/2025/12/19/w...

They’re really pushing this narrative about the new CEO. If you want to believe women at HC have suddenly done the right thing, sure. But - Walliams’ editor/publisher was a woman, new head of kids dept & head of Corp Comms both women and new CEO all knew about this for 10+ years and did nothing.

Your usual reminder that the UCKG is an extraordinarily shady outfit. It is not clear what the money they collect is for or where it goes. They are collecting all over London today. Avoid.

For anyone as confused as I initially was by this post - some background… www.the-londoner.co.uk/london-cult-...

Exiting Nvidia is a curious strategy in funding OpenAI, given the two companies are so financially connected.

The section "'Evidence' limitations" is particularly important to understand.