I agree about the alt-protein and disagree with any sharp "farmland vs nature" distinction; in Britain habitats like chalk grassland need to be grazed and would be destroyed by an absence of grazing animals or by unmanaged overgrazing.

The improvement in vegan alt-meats in the last decade has been astonishing and I’m convinced that over my lifetime we’ll flatten the curve on meat-eating before seeing it drop precipitously. This will free up vast swathes of farmland for return to nature.

At 3k followers, I’ll reveal which Python libraries are conscious.

Not thrilled with the framing but this is progress. “Since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN4b...

Only just learned that Lidl are opening their first pub just outside of Belfast and it's called... The Middle Ale: www.irishnews.com/news/busines...

Remake of Point Break with climbing instead of surfing. It could be called Pirates of the Carabiner.

A tale of solidarity in Durham: www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

The department AI policy that can be spoken is not the eternal department AI policy

One way to avoid having technological revolutions being directed by reckless children pursuing medium-term financial interests is the socialization of investment. There are a few ways we might pursue this. Here's one recent proposal: autonomy.work/wp-content/u...

Hey! This book is very good. If you like novels that deal with grief, embodiment, and why we go on, I think you'll like it. And pre-ordering is good for authors, beats inflation, and maybe you’ll forget you did it so it’ll be a nice surprise for future you lucentdreaming.com/product/the-...

Opened an article in a new tab, but then a thought occurred to me - realistically, I’m not going to read this. And I closed the tab. Who would have thought such a novel thought process possible!

Magnifica Humanitas was a fine encyclical but its politics were a bit iffy. wouldve been way better if at the end the pope turned to the reader & said "i am communist now" & then specified hes the exact kind of communist i am

I had figured the rate of aging, 1 year per year, was the same everywhere.

The greatest computational technology ever built vs some python regex that counts occurrences of the “not X but Y” construction in a document.

Bristol is recruiting a Lecturer in Philosophy, with specialisation in one of and teaching competency in at least three of: Aesthetics Ethics Philosophy of AI Philosophy of Education Political Philosophy Value Theory 24 month post with teaching orientation. www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

addendum to previous post: if this happens, I hope every UK conference will also provide online options. will be sad if it ends up being a no-go place for us, sadder for those who have to live there

Please share!! I'm hiring the first two (of four) postdocs for my ERC project on AI and science!!

Can’t believe this came true

I've read over 100,000 words of first-year philosophy essays in the last week and have been consistently impressed with how thoughtful, creative and human-written they have all been. It's been really refreshing.

Here’s what caught my attention in Grodzinsky’s new book, and why, if we want to understand and explain language in the mind/brain, NLP/LM research and generative grammar may be equally unviable, either alone or combined.👇 1/9

Hearing a lot about how Gen Z are into the prosentential theory of truth.

I wonder when it stops being weird to see undergraduates citing and discussing your friends. I still can't help thinking 'wait, how do you know them?' any time I see it.

Wikipedia coming out strong against Wittgenstein here with the claim that the world is the totality of things.

The zetetic turn has gone too far.

I've joked that the only true conspiracy theory was that conspiracy theories are promoted by the powerful to direct people away from the complex, structural nature of their oppression. One theory to inoculate against all others...

Did the foolish thing during a department meeting where I said 'this sounds like an empirical issue' and now I have to actually do the analysis of the data. Should have stuck with trying to work things out using my intuitions like a proper philosopher.

How do *you* know that history isn’t the progression of the world spirit to greater self-consciousness of its own freedom?

I hear that the author of The Selfish Gene is anthropomorphising things he shouldn’t.

Hi, I’m John Knox, and welcome to Jackass.

A behavioural criterion can travel halfway around the world while a mechanistic explanation is still putting on its shoes.

Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann will be in Belfast this year and I will basically be this kid until the end of August: m.youtube.com/watch?v=_AAB...

Inflation changes gradually and people can’t distinguish 0.1% inflation from 0.2% inflation. Assuming a safety condition on knowledge, we must reject luminosity and grant that people may know that the economy is bad without knowing that they know.

Foundation models in neuroscience predict brain activity at unprecedented accuracy. But prediction ≠ understanding, and we should avoid conflating the two. New essay now out:

New FAccT paper in which @travislacroix.bsky.social, @sashamtl.bsky.social and I discuss the tendency in NLP to combine claims with strong everyday readings with exculpating caveats in the work. This kind of pattern. Travis has a thread: bsky.app/profile/trav...

New paper pre-print, accepted at FAccT 2026, wherein @fintanmallory.com , @sashamtl.bsky.social , and I argue that hype-laden AI terms like “hallucination”, “reasoning”, and “agent” are doing strategic, rhetorical work, which we call "glosslighting".

There’s a bank called Capital One?!?! What next, a credit card called Grundrisse?? A hedge fund called The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte???…

It’s an inconvenient artistic fact that any sufficiently pious martyrdom is indistinguishable from slapstick.

I find this surprisingly comforting

Might become one of those philosophers who reifies information and treats like a magic fluid that flows through biological systems making them mean stuff.

Monday morning, time to rise and grind!* *Cultivate wisdom and compassion.

Just in case you needed any more reasons to support this crowdfunder, once things are up and running, I’ll be teaching a course on Marxist philosophy here: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/booksfromb...

This is unacceptable

Thinking of becoming one of those niche-construction people. I’ll go around pointing at things and saying, ‘You know what that is? It’s a niche’. It sounds fun.

Here’s some close ups of the print you could get either by entering the £10 prize draw or by donating £60+ to our crowdfunder: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/booksfromb... Please consider doing so, we’re trying to bring the first radical bookshop in decades to Newcastle! If you can’t donate, pls share!!

True analytic philosophy has never been tried

Learning to read philosophy is a skill and someone is losing out if they only learn to read within one tradition or time-period. My undergrad had a two-year module dedicated to this. At Durham, we have a module called ‘Reading Philosophy’. I don’t get the impression that this is the norm though.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re formally modelling complex social phenomena (analytic) or poetically articulating the nature of alienation (continental), both are sound Marxist traditions.

Remember when Artemis II splashed down? That was great.