A little update to this. A source emailed me to say they'd used an industry tool to look up Coral Hart's sales and they totaled only 37 copies for the books under that pen name. So, yeah I do not believe the six figures on 50k sales the NYT reported.

the most anti-LGBT+ government since Thatcher is also the government with the most links to paedophiles since Thatcher. what an odd coincidence that requires no further thought or inspection

People on Reddit are getting Amazon to refund their Ring products because of their partnership with Flock and that creepy Super Bowl ad www.reddit.com/r/FlockSurve...

I'd say it's more than adjacent to LLMs since it was literally made using an LLM. It's spurious and essentially meaningless.

Stoat (formerly Revolt) is an open source Discord-like app that can host communities or can be installed on one's own virtual private server. stoat.chat

U.K. might lose a prime minister because a guy who worked for him knew another guy who hung out with Epstein. Meanwhile the U.S. opposition party is telling our President, who was Epstein's best friend, that his secret police should get better training so their public street murders look less messy.

I love living in non-independent Scotland, where a UK Labour spokesperson responds to a Scottish Labour leader's criticism with "nonsense. look at the great things we are doing in England"

Stoat (formerly Revolt) is an open source Discord-like app that can host communities or can be installed on one's own virtual private server. stoat.chat

Starmer is only the most recent chapter in a very long story of how Westminster fails Scotland. Obviously he should go. Obviously he will. But Scotland doesn't just need a new chapter in the same story. Independence lets choose our own future.

The Vue St Enoch strike is temporarily suspended until 17 February 2026 to test management's claim that the workers can achieve their aims through internal processes. We shall see. www.reddit.com/r/glasgow/co...

What's that you say, Anas? That you tweeted this last year in 2025 about your 'old friend' Peter Mandelson and now you think Starmer should resign but you should keep your job?

We’ve been made aware of individuals receiving emails claiming to be from the OBC, requesting fees from authors. To be clear: OBC does not charge individuals, book clubs, or authors for meetings/events. We're a collective funding model that channels library support to OA publishers & infrastructure.

That Bluesky Map doesn't automatically rewrite http to https so I'm not sure how I could possibly trust the veracity of its cartography.

99% of modern security products are just some company going "would you like this app that gamifies paranoia" and you going "yeag" like just don't do it. just turn it off

why do you need to observe your house if you're not in it. you are giving yourself an opt-in mental illness. no one has to live like this

Solidarity with Edinburgh Napier folks this week ✊🏻

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

Surely the drawbacks of the camera drones at the Winter Olympics – they're noisy and distracting to me as a viewer never mind the athletes – outweigh the benefits of the meagre and often poorly-framed footage that they occasionally get.

Pretty much all "successful" gen-AI use is gaming an existing economony by hitting a scale and speed that exploits its margins, but no one is watching/reading/playing/enjoying this stuff. It's just elbowing others out the way to catch the trickle-down out of the tech machine

Oh she’s a scam artist, got it! Every single time you hear about a person offering coaching in one of these pieces they’re just a scammer and the media falls for it

sorry hi yeah just one question about the starters

Someone just ran into the pub I was in and shouted "The war on the Soft Left is over!" and everyone started cheering and crying and making toasts to Ed Miliband and a state driven green energy transition. Never seen anything quite like it

Anytime I see Jeff Bezos mentioned I remember the time he flew to space with William Shatner and when a very emotoinal Shatner was trying to describe the experience Bezos interrupted by spraying champagne like an idiot child

Right, but just to clarify, you did not appoint Peter Mandelson, because you were not Prime Minister.

Absolutely tremendous work here, no notes. (Apart from to say that this proposal is by the actual president of RIBA)

Since some people are discussing MPs salaries, I'll repost my belief that they shouldn't be paid a penny. They should get room, board, and travel but shouldn't be allowed to own anything.

I think one of the most annoying aspects of the slow death of Starmer's premiership is the constant refrain he is a "decent man". He is leading the most anti-immigrant and anti-LGBT government of if not my life, certainly my voting life time! It's really, really horrible! That's not "decent"!

Picture 1: Two plain clothes police officers during a search of Peter Mandelson's home Picture 2: Police search Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell's home

I don’t want to laugh at a small business but also VERY funny

In 2026, in Scotland alone, we're losing @404ink.bsky.social, @quindriepress.com & @hauntpublishing.bsky.social. I really want to see new nimble presses rise from the ashes but it's difficult to recommend starting a company in this market.

The Cymera Prize for Speculative Short Fiction is open to any writer living in Scotland or Scottish by birth or inclination, aged at least 14 years. Submissions are open from Monday 12th January 2026 until 8pm BST on Sunday 22nd March 2026. www.cymerafestival.co.uk/2026-prize

To echo Martin, LLMs are good at small, specific, and clearly defined tasks. They're good at generating repeated lines of slightly different SQL for example. But they can't diagnose problems or tell you what to do to fix something reliably. I've seen them make up Python modules or PHP extensions.

I need everyone to know that on the crochet subreddit the mods made a big post about how they're taking a week off because there was too much fighting/political posts. so there's currently no mods on r/crochet and people are being absolutely insane

Anas Sarwar says today of Peter Mandelson: “I'm utterly disgusted and furious about the entire situation … He never should have been the ambassador to the US.” For context, here’s Sarwar in April 2025 love-bombing his ‘old friend’. They think we are stupid. He is an amoral opportunistic chancer.

If you're not familiar with Fobazi Ettarh's scholarship, her essay on vocational awe is a foundational text in critical librarianship. The best time to read it was any time since it was published, the second best time is right now: www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocatio...

Take the time to do this folks. The proposed changes to ILR are shocking and cruel, which is made abundantly clear in the text of the public consultation linked below. Please lend your voice to try to mitigate the cruelty.

Some gloomy independent Essex councillor complaining about a duck x-ing sign when he has "lived here 25 years and I've never seen a duck cross the road, we’ve got no ponds, there’s no water". A cursory look at a map reveals a local nature reserve literally across the road from where he's standing.

the particularly disgusting thing about this is making out that somehow migrants have been taking the piss by taking taxis everywhere, when in fact the home office itself has mandated that they see doctors miles away (hundreds of miles in some cases), with no properly arranged transport.

Renfeild: I booked your passage on the Demeter, master Dracula: thankfs. dont foret the box of,, dert

One of our key points is that radical librarianship has been more resistant to codification and dilution within mainstream library thought than critical librarianship and we explore this appropriation of critical thought in terms of decolonisation work in libraries.

I'm pleased to have co-authored a new article out today in the Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship. Kevin Sanders, @sluginkpress.bsky.social, and I reflect on the Radical Librarians Collective and how we situate radical librarianship alongside critical librarianship. doi.org/10.33137/cja...

A hideous episode; Mandelson got trounced by poet Lemn Sissay in the vote to be Chancellor of the University of Manchester (vote by staff and students), so Mandelson went down the road to the neighbouring Manchester Metropolitan University and management rolled out the red carpet for him.

The special issue of the Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship on "Reflections and Speculations on Critical Librarianship" (which I co-edited with Sam Popowich and Lydia Zvyagintseva) is now available! Many thanks to the authors and co-editors: cjal.ca/index.php/ca...

worth noting that the second rich people stopped being afraid of mobs tearing them limb from limb, they stopped building libraries and opera houses and stuff and started ripping the copper wiring out of the walls of society instead