Like it genuinely hadn't even occurred to me before that Microsoft Word was something you could just... not use?

Simon's brilliant talk at #OIPA2026 has really inspired me as I set up my new laptop and processes for freelance life. So far LibreOffice is great! I don't have a single Microsoft product on my computer! None of my business expenditure is funding genocide in Palestine that I know of!

this is an incredible and growing thread on the deeply dodgy SafeToNet, likely to be a chief beneficiary of the government's sudden interest in 'protecting children online'

Yep. Plus misogynist leftist men get very aggressive about feedback. They're *good* people. They've read bell hooks and Judith Butler. Who are you - a mere wom - to suggest that talking over everyone else, or using misogynistic slurs, makes them sexist?

how we cooking the xenomorph? How we neutralising the molecular acid while retaining that essential piquancy? No wrong answers

It is great to have the metadata back, with links to theses in institutional repositories. But it's still a mere shadow of what EThOS once was. The BL cyberattack continues to impoverish our digital knowledge record.

why are they so weird

"Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it."

I once met Count Binface at an Edinburgh Fringe. In his human form, he flyered us and we chatted for a while. He'd written for some obscure TV shows that we enjoyed so we went to his show. During the show, he revealed that he was Lord Buckethead / Count Binface to huge applause.

I'm giving whole blood later today (good timing as Scotblood is showing slightly low on my A+ blood) and will ask about platelets.

If you're in the UK, and particularly if you're in Scotland, and have donated blood before please could I ask you to consider donating platelets as a matter of urgency.

Need a shared doc for a class or a standup in seconds? Open an Etherpad, send the link, and everyone types together in real time. No accounts, no Google, no tracking. Free forever. https://etherpad.org

I was pleased to contribute to this collectively-authored book and to receive my physical copy earlier this week! The book was published using an experimental technical infrastructure and was one of the pilot projects that we nurtured over the course of the Open Book Futures project.

Now available for direct order from Minor Compositions: Publishing as Collective Infrastructure. What if a book wasn’t an endpoint, but an infrastructure? A collective experiment in feminist servers, open-source tools, and autonomous knowledge production. www.minorcompositions.info?p=1918

The SCP Foundation wiki and all of the collaborative fiction emerging from it are explicitly CC BY-SA licensed so I would think any derivation of it, including a film, would also need to be distributed as CC BY-SA.

Come join us… if you dare 😈 🪓

Our fantastic pickets this morning and afternoon 💗✊🏻💗 The number of students and parents thanking staff on the pickets for their dedicated hard work as lecturers and support staff AND for fighting against the cuts made us a bit teary. Thank you for all your support #StopTheCuts

Farage is doing what fascists do. Claiming the "will of the people" or "his people" is more important than the law.

"Brexit is thanks to me". Ten seconds later: "The UK is in dire straits economically."

Hearing rumours that Nigel Farage has embraced the light of Islam and quoted the Shahada live on air.

Visiting my university’s new, expensively-refurbished space for startup incubators and senior management and cannot imagine a better illustration of the American university at this moment in time than a breathlessly press-released “collaboration room” featuring a single desk and chair.

What feature films has this actor appeared in? Is it, in fact, none? Is NBC News just regurgitating press releases from tech companies?

In gremlins 2 when a panicked Pheobe Cates pulls the fire alarm, the fire alarm pontificates “Fire! The untamed element, oldest of man’s mysteries, giver of warmth [etc]” anyway that’s what it’s like when you google something now.

Since apparently this isn't making it beyond UK news yet, Rockstar petitioned a British court to section an 18 year old autistic kid under the mental health act for hacking their server and leaking a short GTA 6 clip a couple of years ago. No trial, no term of sentence, just locked up in hospital.

Weizenbaum was an MIT computer scientist who built one of the first chatbots, ELIZA. He wrote the book out of a growing sense of horror as he saw how “extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people” ...

“Put human connection back at the centre of learning” should not sound so radical and yet

Don't worry: universities are making sure everyone is "AI-literate". (It might surprise some people to discover how hostile many of my colleagues in an engineering department are to AI.)

well that was quick

Regular reminder that research assessment reform is, above all, a labour issue.

The rig I'm on has put up first aid guides that were made with AI. Wouldn't bother with CPR there, would be more concerned by the fact is head isn't connected to his body

Watching EVENT HORIZON and getting distracted reading about how the politics of the film's future are expressed through flags on characters' uniforms. Thanks, /r/vexillology! www.reddit.com/r/vexillolog...

We said we'd be back. This film has loads of literature on it so we get into quite a few different readings of the film in this episode particularly around representations of masculinity and femininity.

We continue our new pod with T2: JUDGMENT DAY. @Simonxix.com & @JimGR.bsky.social discuss how this film develops as a sequel, the various - some dubious - readings of this film in literature, shifting of genre and tone, how masculinity & femininity are presented & subverted: buff.ly/dtZrKZv #filmsky

fuck it. comparing streaming server usage to ai server usage is fucking absurd and saying "bUt StReAmInG UsEs MoRe EnErGy" is ridiculous. these are not the same types of equipment and they are not doing similar types of load.

a lot of stuff becomes much clearer when you stop understanding what happens in glasgow as ‘sectarianism’ and understand it as a peculiar local form of triumphal british nationalism, which actually occurs everywhere in the uk

Going down this handy list of UK cities sorted by population size (apart from the "cities" of London), the first I haven't been to is Bristol.

Vegan pizza crunch for lunch 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

of course this is being framed as some kind of experience of injustice rather than simply "my political views, deemed abhorrent by many, rendered me unelectable"

It's so funny how the brain can work on technical problems while you sleep. I was banging my head against an OMP post-upgrade issue yesterday and, despite having no reason to be so certain, I woke up absolutely certain that I knew exactly which configuration option was the problem. I was right.

"Suddenly I revealed I think a large section of the population should have no rights and people held that against me?"

It was only two months ago that Ed Balls castigated Zack Polanski on live TV for daring to call him a "Labour politician".

Was it a good idea to let go of employees who cost a fixed amount per month in favour of multiple private company's black box services for which they can arbitrarily raise the cost of tokens whenever they like?

Head of the EHRC really did just say Phrenology will help solve the issue of transgenders in society

some amazing things happening over on threads — ever since they “shut down CERN”

From Anti-Fascist Action Dundee: The Aberdonian far-right group Unite the Klans are planning to descend on Dundee alongside fascists from across Scotland. Gather against these far-right thugs on Dundee City Square at 1400 on 18th July.

Scotland should not allow war criminals or fascists to profit from our land or our people. It's time to seize Trump's golf courses.

Absolutely Kafkaesque. The University of Exeter - a nonprofit - is turning a profit. Its managers say this demands budget cuts. They made everyone who knew in advance sign NDAs, waited for end of term, then eviscerated the environmental sciences during the second generational heatwave of June 2026.

comprehensive overview of water companies in public ownership in devolved nations you got there shame if someone were to ctrl-f scot