"Welcome to Decline" -- still one of my favourite graphs from last year. In the late 1970s, Britain's economic fate very clearly split in two. How much you blame Thatcher will depend on your politics, but her leadership is useful to understand the timing. tomforth.co.uk/welcometodec...

Ribblehead viaduct at sunset featuring Avanti… It’s very very very cold here! But worth braving the cold for a photo I think

podcasts

They gentrified the tinfoil hat

Hope no one thinks about using the Avanti West Coast mainline service to Glasgow next week. There’s the usual engineering works and then there’s this… It’s understandable given they’re swapping a major bridge out in just two weeks but let’s not pretend this is a viable replacement service…

IPv6 is a wonderful example of what happens if you let a disparate group of engineers try to solve all the pet problems they can think of rather than just the problems that need fixed. Doubling the IP address size (with legacy V4 being 0.0.0.0.A.B.C.D) would have been more than fine, even now.

how all youtube ads sound to me

If you need a hearty laugh (I did) you need to read this entire thread (I did). I’m in my house laughing like a *fool*. I’m good for the rest of the day now 😆

1/x What do you do if you need to lift or lower ships 70m (230ft) in height difference on your inland waterways? Locks, you say...? could be a solution, but...

Also - who supplied the numbers here? OpenAI? Well, I’m sure they wouldn’t have any incentive at all to show a service of theirs being used at an incredible rate. In addition to that, if we’re comparing apples to apples, are they saying they have 800M unique users? Suuuuuuuure. 😉

Oh, fuck off

Just watched the new Knives Out and I think it's really important you know that the scene in the Seminary's Gym is filmed in the same place Rick Astley filmed the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. I saw the window tracery and immediately made my friends pause the film so I could tell them.

It’s the Gail Sale! 50% OFF Christmas cards & wrap 20% OFF unframed prints Use code GAILSALE Ends 18 January 2026 www.gailmyerscough.co.uk

“Buy our home security package named after someone who was utterly destroyed by a back door break-in he didn’t see coming because he was focused solely on the front door.”

I wish I could quote this with enormous flashing neon lights shouting “THIS!”. Machine learning has been with us for decades and is an invaluable tool for domain specific evaluation. That it’s now endlessly mixed up with AI LLMs is unbelievably infuriating.

It’s simultaneously annoying and unsurprising to see academics and researchers who argue that creating a digital mind is improbable or impossible being subjected to more criticism and held to a higher standard than those arguing that tech bros are creating a completely new form of sentient life

This is deeply creepy and disturbed shit. If you work on this stuff as an engineer, you’re an absolute fuckwit asshat and need to seriously review the life choices that got you to this point. This whole area needs to be drowned in prohibitive legal liability conditions…

This is wild shit. And it happened to more than one person so I guess it could be legit. Of course, take everything with a grain of salt. But. DoorDasher made AI pics of delivered food using Street View imagery. Burrito Taxi Meets AI Slop was bound to happen at some point

Every year I make handmade crackers, and the kid moans about the “dad jokes”, so this year I have decided to talk more directly to Gen Z. (Also: clipper lighters and scratch cards in every one. HAPPY CHRISTMAS!)

Ooh heck. It's Xmas at the Greenwich Meridian, which means it's officially Xmas everywhere in the known universe.

An image of the Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool. I lived beside it for so many years when I directed plays on the Unity Theatre stage and taught community film workshops. Looking across the Mersey when I captured this photograph years later made me proud and emotional. A wonderful city.

Just passing through the Pennines (namely Royston Vasey) as I head back to Manchester. The shops offer some rather questionable Christmas card options.

This feels like it should be @katebevan.com’s Christmas card for next year…

Bob Hoskins in … The Long Christmas Day

One reason it seems to you like your parents were better off financially when you were kid is that you didn’t have to pay any of the bills

Me: I don’t see the appeal of boxing TV: OK but what if it’s professional boxers savagely brutalizing influencers Me:

It’s QVC time, Christmas edition 🎄 Open 11–5pm every day till Christmas Eve (or till I fall over 😅). T-shirts restocked, music/art/culture books, merino beanies, alpaca socks, coffee & candles. In-person, no postie panic. South Side secret. Big love, Richie X

THREAD. My parents' cat Bridget vanished. As the weeks dragged on they became ever more worried, so to distract himself my dad began to paint Bridget's adventures, imagining her travelling through time and popping up at some of art & music's most important moments. I've collected his work here...

Jake Paul’s fortunate to be conscious after that. If Joshua had hit him straight on to the front of his head rather than rounded a hit to his jaw (that broke it), he’d be lucky just to be in a coma right now. You can see AJ take a beat to work out how to finish it without actually killing him. Oof.

Well that’s the Commonwealth Games stuffed then. They’ve had sweetheart coverage for *years* on the BBC. Throw in last minute change to Glasgow, a reduced sports list, tight finances and now on pay-tv? Oof.

welcome home to your parents’ house, the channels are Yellowstone, masterpiece mystery, and Jimmy fallon, btw someone from your high school died in a real weird way

The Yule cat, Jólakötturinn, is a huge, vicious cat from Icelandic folklore that is said to lurk in the snowy countryside during the festive season and eat people that do not receive new clothing to wear before Xmas Eve. (Or, more boringly, eat the food of people without new clothes.) Good morning!

Really excellent thread from Pete about creativity and what personal expression actually means to creating art.

Made fae girders

As one example, every original drama on one major UK broadcaster this year was written by a man.

This is just perfect

Absolutely shocking. We're offering an overall award of £10k for information that leads to a conviction in these cases. We need to make raptor persecution a thing of the past.

Fair

Oh, look who’s got his trotters in the grift trough…

Happy birthday Beethoven youtu.be/t9ApIbDlk9Y?...

I’m not sure about the plot for the next Glass Onion film at *all*…

I think thats this one www.youtube.com/shorts/XtVBQ...

It’s been my firm belief that everyone should have to work retail at some point in their life, like national service. If you can work a till at 3pm on Christmas Eve in a busy store, you can do anything…

Banks save £2 billion a year from abandoning our high streets and town centres. Our post offices pick up the slack, but they are not funded by the banks anywhere near enough to be able to maintain their presence. This must change.

not the kind of behavior I expect from the winner of the fifa peace prize

🚨 THE BATTLE BEGINS 🚨 Your favorite year-end contest is back. It’s time to choose who will be this year’s Worst Person In Tech for 2025! Each day of this week new matchups will drop until we choose the winner on Friday. 🗳️ Cast your ballot: twsu.forms.app/worst-person...

Architecture fans also need to know about this, incidentally…

this field biologist does a great job highlighting the insidiousness of AI editing these one-click AI edit buttons are incredibly appealing to many photographers, amateurs and professionals alike, and are framed as innocuous this is worth sharing and educating people about

Yup. This is the same crud that’s rife in Cumbria right now. No taste, basic cold symptoms and eventual cough, absolutely knackered, bleah. Negative for Covid. Had all my jabs too so I’m assuming this is the “best case” of whatever the fuck it was.