Is there a decent Gmail plugin that can tell me if emails I receive are likely to be written by AI?

So many “traditional recipes” turn out to be “printed on the back of a margarine packet in 1971”.

He’s right. Over to you @andyburnham.bsky.social. I’ll vote for you in the leadership election if you top this.

Apropos of nothing, John Swinney had an undistinguished term as leader of the opposition, leading to his party going backwards in an election and him stepping down as leader... Before returning years later as a safe pair of hands, regaining the initiative and winning an election that looked lost.

Back in the day someone would have set up "haskeirstarmerquityet.com" and there would be several terrible Flash games about the PPS resignations. I miss the old internet.

I have no idea why Labour thinks it can find a middle ground that mollifies Brexit supporters. There is none. Brexit is an economic, social and geopolitical failure for this country and the sooner they accept the only way to fix it is to fully reverse it, the sooner we can all move on.

I forget who described chatbot prompts as "incantations", but that's what they are.

What I want to know is why, given practice/practise, licence/license and advice/advise, there isn’t uce/use.

Britain has the opportunity to do something very funny with the Strait of Dover

A fun thing I am working on: challengeworks.org/news/we-are-... Lots of ways to get involved in the coming months.

People *think* AI will kill us all by nuking us. But it will *actually* kill us all when Russia and the US speak on Google Meets, the US team stay on the line for a post-summit moan, then Gemini emails everyone a transcript of the moan and the Russians are so furious they nuke the world.

Thanks Google, that's very helpful

“It sounds insane and happened in Italy in the 80s or 90s” are astonishingly good criteria for this. False flags, fascists, communists, assassinations, organised crime, massive corruption. There’s even a subplot featuring terrorist Freemasons en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaga...

Help I found this journal on amazon and the prompts in the image were clearly filled out by AI

We trained our business AI on thousands of failed companies doesn’t sound like a great selling point.

‘Why did the USSR, with its fantastic scientists and engineers and heavy investment in STEM, nevertheless stagnate?’ Excoriating from @geoffmulgan.bsky.social on the undervaluing of social science and humanities research blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

How do we make invention and innovation central to the UK's future? In the latest Options for the UK essay, Nesta’s Joe Owen proposes a 'British Nobel Prize' - a future-focused challenge award to reignite our culture of invention and solve major societal problems of our time. How could it work? ⤵️

This is kind of interesting on some of the “tells” of AI writing. For me what’s distinctive about AI text is more general though - a sense of reading something where the words are unmoored from underlying meaning. I try to grab at it and … there’s not enough there to catch hold of.

This is a very good article. www.newstatesman.com/technology/2...

As the Artemis astronauts return from the Moon, it feels relevant to repost this… on Guyana’s small but important contribution to the Apollo 11 landing ojusher.medium.com/the-stories-...

“vibe McKinsey-style reports” is an extremely funny sequence of words

It’s been clear for a long time that many people think images are just a vibe (hence stock photos), numbers are a vibe (BS impact stats and KPIs) and diagrams a vibe (see most PowerPoints). So it shouldn’t have come as a big surprise when LLM use revealed that, to many, written info is a vibe too.

The irony is that going slower - more deliberately designed - is going faster. Embedding AI in a human-centered (rather than state or corporate centered) way will make it more productive, equitable and less likely to generate political backlash. We never learn. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

I took Google Slides' "beautify this slide" button, and got Google Slides to beautify it ten times in a row. 🧵

every time you press this button, it should automatically notify HR

This is a very funny button. You press it and it makes your slide look like dogshit.

In related news, today I had to explain to a younger colleague what the BBC Micro was.

This is absolutely correct, HOWEVER, my mum’s 1930s Larousse Gastronomique (featuring “renard” under R and “serpent” under S) is never going on a skip as long as I live.

thought leader | keynote speaker | 30 under 30

Don’t invade Russia in winter. Don’t troll the menswear guy. Don’t start a fight with Jack Reacher. It’s really not hard.

I once took an 18 hour ferry journey on which they played Livin La Vida Loca by Ricky Martin on loop for the entire crossing

The Times recently reported that Uber wants to launch an air taxi service in London. That sounded familiar to my friend Deran and me... because we worked on a similar plan a whole decade ago. Here's a glimpse into the most sci-fi topic I've ever worked on! www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-wor...

oh my word 🧡

Love this. There is definitely a distinctive British typography from about the 30s to the 60s (Gill Sans, slab serifs, Transport, Rail Alphabet), but I don’t think there really is any more? (Compare to Italy where there’s still an unmistakably Italian accent in signage everywhere.)

This is nuts. But also I don’t understand why nobody is promoting the obvious and 100% legal loophole - fly to Dublin on the EU passport, get a train to Belfast, then a domestic flight back to mainland UK. It’s a faff, but it beats being stranded abroad www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Things are about to kick off at the @alzheimerssoc.bsky.social / @challengeworks.bsky.social Longitude Prize on Dementia winner’s announcement...

Yes, GDP is an imperfect measure, but it's far more useful than its critics let on. Health, public services, cohesion and welfare are far easier to improve in a country that has money. Many of the UK's problems are downstream of two decades' economic stagnation. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Email etiquette, a timeline 2015: Scrupulously edit all emails, FULL punctuation 2017: Don't use too many exclamation marks! People will think you are a small girl! 2021: Occasionally leave out full-stops as a power move 2026: One typo per email to show an AI didn't write it

Yes, that’s what she said. Is it what she meant? Who knows. But it’s totally disqualifying either way.

Assuming this is like the @raffic.bsky.social uples and banunus song, and we’ll soon get supreme leaders Khimenei, Khemenei and Khumenei. Possibly in very quick succession if things keep going the way they’re going.

Fascinating that a phenomenally innovative company with amazing robotics, warehouse and logistics tech is struggling to compete with gig economy e-bike riders picking up stuff from supermarkets. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

I too like to lie on my back on the floor under my boiler waiting for the unskippable ad for a scrotum shaver to finish playing before locating the valve I need

This and @andrewgreenway.bsky.social (andrewgreenway.substack.com/p/in-permane...) today mean your lunchtime reading should realistically be on state capacity.

A response to @pollymackenzie.bsky.social: yes, there are no levers in government. But it was a choice to get rid of them, and we shouldn't be so sanguine about lack of state capacity. ojusher.medium.com/government-b...

We could, as it were, Switch to a different card payment system www.theguardian.com/business/202...

It’s all particularly silly because it’s not even about *entering* the UK: British citizens have unqualified right to be here regardless of paperwork. It’s about *right to board planes or ferries travelling here*, for which the state outsources its administrative overreach to transport operators.

More seriously: I would have a kinetic energy limit for cars on roads, rather than a speed limit. The heavier the car, the slower it has to go.

NotebookLM is also the one AI tool I’ve tried that I’ve been impressed with. I think because it’s a specialised tool designed for a clear use case - which is not what chatbots are.

"Those 18-year-olds – the first guinea pigs, the class who matriculated in 2012 – are now turning 31. And belatedly, the impact of the loans they were assured were a rock-solid investment in their futures is becoming apparent." Some thoughts on student loans www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

Everybody thinks 'https://' stands for 'hypertext transfer protocol secure' but it actually stands for 'head to this place, sucka' followed by a colon and two laser sounds