Dad’s books are full of empathy, common sense, and a healthy suspicion of the powerful. But at its heart his work is also about how systems keep people poor while pretending it’s their own fault. So I hope Kemi’s taking notes as well as reading the jokes.

Kofta kebabs from 1660? Who says England didn't have a national cuisine? Possibly even more traditional than fish and chips!

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

When I was a teenager there was a bus direct from my hometown in Germany to London - we had a British army base, and this direct bus connection was one of the benefits of that. One summer I went on that bus to go volunteer in an old people's home in Southend-on-Sea. I had just turned 18 and was... 🧵

Bless those who think the Home Office can successfully carry out a huge IT procurement exercise for digital ID cards for implementation before the next general election.

Ah, he has seen what regulatory lawyers look like: with their seven heads and ten horns, and upon their horns ten crowns, and upon their heads the word ”compliance”.

hello, i made this bot. i am a trans autistic anti-fascist. you are following a work of trans autistic anti-fascist art. that is why it is screaming

Mood.

Passport checks at internal Schengen borders... Delightful...

Time for a 12+ hour train journey

Good, I guess. Rather late though.

Oh no

🤬

Here’s a poem called ‘English Roundabouts’.

Part of me thinks "this cheapens political discourse". Another - slightly bigger - part of me thinks "HAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA GO ED!" ~AA

An assassin writes Bella Ciao in the same breath as a Notices Your Bulge meme on his bullets. One of the government responses is a practicing Hindu asserting that the fundamentalist Christian victim will join him in a Norse pagan afterlife. Welcome to the epistemic collapse.

Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge? It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door.

Look, they cannot even do bread-and-butter cases. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/u...

“They claim to read the same books” is such a multilayered burn, I LOVE it

Ooooh, new type of moon just dropped. Good to see it's still reinventing itself after ~4 billion years.

Academia may not give you job security, flexibility, or wealth, but it will let you unexpectedly connect to eduroam in foreign cities

just leaving this on loop for an hour before bed

Imagine someone saying this about other skill sets that require practice. “I don’t have natural soccer abilities, so I have to use the kicks-ball-for-me machine.” Develop a skill or don’t. It’s fine. But using an LLM or a kicks-ball-for-me machine still means you aren’t the one doing that thing.

Monday

I just tabbed away from my ADHD appointment intake forms to draw Carmen Sandiego on wplace.live HOW MUCH MORE EVIDENCE DO YOU PEOPLE NEED?!

@gralefrit.bsky.social You have to see these! A friend of mine has been collating a series of images entitled "Things my students have written turned into Philomena Cunk quotes" and they're just glorious.

I should add a cute dogs count which is at like 25

Today is the 47th anniversary of this clearly unimprovable photo, from a story so absurd that it shouldn’t be true, but is: the day a team of workers from British Waterways pulled the plug out of the Chesterfield Canal, and all the water emptied out

Shock as model that has no concept of a number continues to struggle with doing anything with numbers

IDK about the feasibleness of this project

I aspire to a position more nuanced than "I hate generative AI" but I just can't get there. In theory it doesn't have to suck. In practice it does.

Bro, it’s probably nothing but your theme in the score has a very ominous leitmotif. Lots of triads, a couple of crashing minor cords. I don’t want to make a big deal or anything but I couldn’t help but notice it’s really dissonant???

Motherfucking wind farms…

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

I thought I'd get more tempted to use AI as it developed but lol nope

There are worse places to be sat still on a train

Details here seem interesting. In particular it's interesting that the harder/longer the problem the worse AI does just worse. And that even for the easier tasks it doesn't actually seem to speed them up compared to a good human

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

“After two glorious years at the helm of this wonderful company, I have decided that being CEO during the release of Mechahitler was honestly a pretty bad vibe.”

Fair play, the cycle of “A Corbyn thing is happening! / Wait maybe it isn’t? / Oh if looks like they fucked it / But maybe that’s unfair? / No they definitely fucked it” has all been some terrific memory lane content; now we await only the botched resolution and blaming of the media

INDIANA JONES AND THE ETHICS COMMITTEE REVIEW

Surely they should clean the stage *before* letting the audience in?

Oh joy. A heisenbug.

am i dying or did i just forget to take my allergy meds

Welp, maybe I will book tickets to that screening of Dr. Strangelove…

Today in explaining my work badly: Some molecules have stuff spinning, but pretend to be not spinning, and sometimes they're normal about it but sometimes they're weird about mirrors.

Welp. That was moderately unpleasant…