Happy 100th birthday to Sir David Attenborough. One of the most important natural history broadcasters, environmental educators and climate voices of our time. 💚

106 years ago today, on May 7th, an undergraduate at Christchurch College, Oxford, drank a glass of port then left through the main gates for a walk. I've been thinking about him, & his walk, for years now. It's taken a long time for me to figure out why - why I've kept returning, near obsessed.

This is the greatest story I've read for some time, and if it's not turned into at least a decent miniseries, the world is not functioning as it should. It is a Kingsley Amis novel transplanted to French academia. It even has a droll detective. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

Every time I see someone talk about Claude I think about how they switched from female to male names as soon as they wanted the robots to seem like experts vs personal assistants.

Aside from the obvious "what a twat" aspect of this, the last bit of advice to candidates seems quite peculiar for a party which would seem to thrive on the Racism-Adjacent Pensioner sector. I'm sure they have Working Racists as well, but odd to abandon the Problematic Elderly Relative demographic.

Me, a child many years ago: Why are there so many fables and stories and parables about Being Careful What You Wish For? What are they so worried about? What do they think people would do?! Me, disappointingly older: Oh. Oh, that's... That's not ideal. We should definitely not do that.

putting how useless Kezia is signalling she’s going to be in charge of Stonewall, it’s wild for The Guardian to describe the charity losing half its income for supporting trans rights as if it was something that happened organically and not as part of a massive hate campaign they took part in

Reading of the "lack of plan" motif apparently most prominent in the current Labour government, and remembering how cunning many declared the "Ming Vase" strategy to be. Perhaps taking a historical "Emperor's Ming Vase" more metaphorically than intended: there doesn't seem to have even been a vase.

Regardless of exactly who knew what and when, are we genuinely inept enough that "announcing the new ambassador before we've even checked if he's allowed to ambassad" is a mistake we make? I've held off on announcing new hires because I haven't had their reference back from a summer job.

Poor Sleep Linked To Gong https://theonion.com/poor-sleep-linked-to-gong/

I guess if there's an upside to... <gestures vaguely> ...all of this... then at least holidays in Omelas are going to be really cheap this season.

Always so telling when members of the Labour Party refer to The Left as a) some kind of capital-letter coherent entity, and b) "them" rather than "us". If you consider the left as something "other", that really should spark some self-reflection as to whether you're in the appropriate party.

This is so important - we don't talk about this kind of thing, anything like enough. AI/LLMs, etc., are going to make scenarios like this even worse. It takes bravery to talk about it, no doubt - it also takes bravery to try and push back on the system before it eats you. We need to support people.

NB, for anyone expecting productivity from me this weekend: Due to the general economic climate, I have been forced to sell my mind palace, and am currently residing in a small mind bedsit. I haven't yet unpacked, and I've just stirred a cup of mind tea with a rolled-up mind placemat.

This could open up a new field of mathematics, a bar where every single person you meet is just The Worst, rewriting previous laws of comparative value. Nobody - nobody - needs a social setting based around "situation monitoring", and anyone who thinks they do should be shunned by polite society.

From mid-April I'll be back on the market looking for work. - 25+ years professional experience. - .NET since the start, Node 3+ years. - See mikehadlow.com/top/about/ for details. - Contract or perm. Slight preference for contract. - Must be remote. (I'm UK based).

On the whole Thiel thing, when you've effectively reached a point where the Pope is saying "whoa, you're taking this religion a bit too literally, there, champ" - that's probably as good a sign as any that you should try and slot in an extra hobby, ideally one that gets you outdoors a bit more.

I'm not sure we have a denomination high enough for such an ovine unit. Should we ever suffer some Zimbabwe-style inflation (and who knows, with everything going on), I nominate this sheep for the £10,000,000 note.

Isn't she supposedly an engineer of some sort? I assume she was down at the docks volunteering with the spanners to get things seaworthy then, rather than just spouting off meaningless antagonistic bollocks without the required contextual knowledge?

I know I’ve got some Labour local gov’t types following me, so I want to say this clearly so that you can share it internally as appropriate: I will never again vote Labour while these policies, or Wes Streeting, are in place. I will not vote Labour at any level because of this.

so what happened was, i read nine john le carré books, then i saw the pictures of the preposterous drapery SCIF at mar a lago where the iran war was being conducted, and then i thought about how many spies there must be at that place and then i wrote a short story buttondown.com/theswordandt...

Data centres create jobs is one of the most obvious and inexcusable grifts imaginable, to the extent that I can't believe it's out there being said by governments. The whole sector has been focused on throwaway redundancy and automation for years. /1

To be fair, Philip Glass is the musical equivalent of "I've just realised I've watched this loop 6 times while waiting for something to happen". He is *made* for TikTok.

The post mortem of 2024 is a classic in only acknowledging the top line result, rather than thinking what par would have been for the starting position. Hemorrhaging votes in solid Labour areas should have been a massive warning light.

"would otherwise receive immediate access to welfare and social housing" is BS. Correct: "after 5 years working in a care home, would be eligible to apply for welfare and social housing on the same basis as the rest of us." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... Deliberately misleading/disingenous.

No, that's not the worst case, you predatory oompa loompa, the worst case is that it triggers mass conflict, destabilises an entire region, disrupts goods, energy and people worldwide, and plunges the planet into another deepening crisis, but hey! You got to play with your toy planes, good job.

"Richard! Stop hiding under a cache-misère of your own mythology! We have guests!"

It's Private Eye I feel sorry for. How do you spoof The Daily Mail these days?

Hold on, I thought he was supposed to be "such a good communicator"? I really wish we could ban that phrase from political calculation, because although it matters, it matters less than being a thundering fucktrumpet.

Without intending to diminish in any way the scholarship that goes into making this so clear and cogent, it's astonishing that something so "obvious" to a lay audience can be so wilfully ignored by a political and media ecosystem (presumably as it doesn't suit a narrative they wish to frame, sure).

Perhaps Lucy Powell could reflect that maybe they've been shouting about values people don't like? Perhaps she could also ponder the fact that when it comes down to it, you shouldn't need to shout about them if you're living them. People can see your values from your actions: they're not pleasant.

So, parties at least nominally/traditionally of the left/centre got around 68% of the vote in Gorton and Denton. Can't wait to see how Labour turn that into a "we aren't persecuting minorities/the vulnerable *enough* actually" move in their game of 5D electoral chess...

Universal higher education saves more money than making people pay for it, and most of the benefits of are downriver from being the sort of people who treat education as an investment, thereby avoiding the terrible expenses inherent to being the sort of people who treat education as a profit center.

This is worth noting as a mechanism. It's also pretty dispiriting to encounter: the kind of dispiriting that can only be alleviated by Wonko™ Brand Uplifting Pastilles - the cure for all of your cultural ailments!

I'm beginning to think that the worst part of a grey goo scenario would be humans going "yeah, it's not great but... It's sort of comfortable? Doesn't taste too bad either, and you know... It's everywhere, so why fight it? Look how much grey goo we've all got, right? Discrete objects are woke."

You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs) Good tech. Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales) Bad tech.

every time i see a white guy in their fifties radicalized by the twitter algorithm into racism and extremism i think about how it's a total failure of the youtube algorithm to instead radicalize him into home brewing, elaborate A/V setups, or DIY solar

I think I might take one of these "under 20 minutes" AI skills courses the UK Govt. seems very keen on everyone doing and live-post it here... Maybe we can all learn something together! The press release sends me to aiskillshub.org.uk/aiskillsboost/ - let's go and see!

Following coverage over the weekend of Sir Paul Nurse's comments that suggested that the only reason that a Fellow should be expelled from @royalsociety.org is scientific misconduct, I have written to him to explain the risks such an attitude poses of increasing sexual harassment in STEM.

🧵 Ok, off-topic #adhd rant, because I'm angry, and in particular, I'm angry at companies that take advantage of people who are desperate for help. In this case, some crap called Liven, but I've seen many more. Now, I have #adhd. It's not a superpower; on balance, it sucks.

The era of "platforms are neutral" is long behind us (or rather it was never really true, but now it's much more obvious). If you're active on X, it may be worth asking yourself if you're just chasing a dopamine hit that evaporated several years ago.

I call on my party and my government to remove themselves entirely from X and communicate with the public where they actually participate online and can be protected from such illegality.

I understand the pressures on the BBC, but Radio 4's coverage of the Minneapolis shooting is an example of "bad balance". It's all "the Trump regime says she was a terrorist, but Democrats say it was murder". The BBC has the footage. It doesn't have to treat truth and falsehood as equally valid.

Grok is awful; it's the very worst example of what running AI without any guardrails and concern for harm looks like. But let's not forget that it's people - and let's be clear here, those people are men - who are telling Grok to make those images.

🗣️ LET’S MAKE CURIOSITY COOL IN 2026

The Telegraph here advocating an surprisingly aggressive response to unwanted Christmas gifts.

Having spent some time looking at the state of #rustlang UI libraries and frameworks, I've decided to see how much of a TUI modular synth it's possible to make. Seeing as ideally most interactions should be through hardware control surfaces...

Do you think we could combine Musk's ludicrous Mars ship obsession with the self-obsessed narcissism of the ultra-rich tech bros to convince them of some kind of B-Ark scenario? Like, we're all coming, but make sure there's ubiquitous GenAI, and everything's financialized before we get there?

Kind of a fun milestone today - the first basic implementation of a DCB sample on Eventrica code! See github.com/eventrica/ev... for the details, but... well, it's pretty cool. It already feels like a nice way to implement relatively complex event-driven logic.

Introduce yourself with five concerts you've seen: The Prodigy Orbital Moderat Jon Hopkins Squarepusher