RIP. Persepolis is one of the handful of graphic novels (Maus, Fun Home) read by people who don't read graphic novels and deservedly so

"Even if the Microsoft Office team employed a philosopher who said you shouldn’t be so certain, because consciousness is not well understood, that would not be sufficient reason for you to take this idea seriously." www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

Y'days post: Immigration numbers and the media mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/06/immi... While in theory the broadcast media has a mission to inform, those within it have little incentive to correct gross public misperceptions on key political issues that the media often itself helps create.

BBC doing this too. "Police pelted with missiles at Henry Nowak protest" smears an innocent victim again Try "Police pelted with missiles after Southampton murder" Inappropriate to call it a "Henry Nowak protest" when his family explicitly call for it NOT to happen. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

What I’m hearing: Instagram’s Trust and Safery org absolutely gutted the last few weeks. ~60% of the org gone - between layoffs and forced reassignments to data labelling. All while “AI maxxing” pushed a bunch of bugs to prod. And hence why today’s massive Instagram account takeover happening.

This is absolutely nuts: hackers are hijacking high-profile Instagram accounts by simply asking Meta's AI chatbot to change the email on the account. Meta's AI does it, hacker gets password reset code, they're in. A staggering security issue www.404media.co/hackers-simp...

🚨Elon Musk has boosted the public profile of Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe on X, pulling Britain’s political discourse towards extreme content and amplifying his influence ahead of a knife-edge election in Makerfield More @FT: as.ft.com/r/80f4639f-0...

Artificial Intelligence and legal work - a crucial case to read There was a routine court application which would usually go through on nod, but the judge suspected something was not right and asked questions, and this then came out. If you must use AI, be careful. www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWH...

Question Time has finally jumped the shark.

Whenever I see Tony Blair appear in the discourse I always think of this scene. www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHu9...

I was on Nigel Farage’s Brexit Fisheries boat and he was serving smoked salmon and I asked him if the smoked salmon was British and he told me to piss off

Obviously Donald Trump is not an expert in refrigerants, but you can be, and understand why these decisions can be hugely consequential for climate change, if you read this quick 🧵:

Thread of incomprehensible excerpts from the EHRC’s new guidelines on single-sex spaces. No alt text in thread unfortunately, but there is a link to the guidance itself. The amount of bother involved in all of this, turning a thing that wasn’t a problem into a massive problem for lots of people 🤦🏻‍♀️

LMAO

Well, there goes that dream

Wow some terrible reporting about Google's latest horrible ideas about how to distort information access in the name of "convenience" (or something): techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/g... A short thread 🧵>>

Not just lobbying! our new paper maps 27 mechanisms of regulatory capture used by Big AI + 11 narrative framings that rationalise capture. “Big AI’s Regulatory Capture: Mapping Industry Interference and Government Complicity” will be presented at #FAccT2026 next month arxiv.org/abs/2605.068... 1/

The Lexiter version of 'Brexit wasn't done properly', with no contrition for the fact that there was never any chance of Lexit being enacted and no recognition that the situation now isn't one in which Labour can just say "ok, let's rejoin instead": www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

All the "is Miliband popular/competent/acceptable after losing 11 years ago" is missing the most crucial point: that the most dramatically satisfying ending is that the guy who lost the election after which everything went wrong comes back and fixes it all. Ask Chekov. Ask Aristotle

Fundamentally, a lot of the problems in British politics comes from a political generation being forced to do something they think is a bad idea, to appease voters they think are wrong with beliefs they don't really understand.

All 136 #LE2026 Council Maps Have now been made and are available on the website: electionmaps.uk/le2026.

Currently listening to Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express and sighing heavily for reasons.

Truly one of the speeches of all time

Meanwhile, I'm still reeling from the fact that Richard Tice can't find it in him to condemn someone for saying that Nigerians should be melted down to fill potholes.

Without minimising the dire results for Labour, it’s extraordinary how chipper the Tories are. They’ve lost 500 seats from a low watermark, lost historic major councils to Lib Dems and Reform, show no signs of recovery in the esp LD areas they need to win. But MPs seem to think it’s going well.

***My substack is live*** My first newsletter has just gone out - looking at how the Home Office managed to make things worse for refugees and put them at greater risk of homelessness, just as everyone said it would chamindajayanetti.substack.com/p/the-home-o...

This is the mantra I recite to myself first thing in the morning while staring into a mirror.

Absolutely fascinating.

"For this focus group, conducted shortly before a sustained green glow began emanating from the station’s superlaser array, we spoke with residents who said they had backed Emperor Palpatine but now felt conflicted."

remember that dumb time in the aughts when richard dawkins was like, The Smart Guy

Lolz. Reform are right not enough people know about The Levellers ... and that includes them ...

Regular reminder that you, an individual, should almost always book direct with your airline. Also: avoid booking through a third party online travel agent (OTA) like lastm*nute/book*ing dot com. This was the case before the current Gulf/oil/jetfuel crisis, and it's even more the case now.

This is horrific www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... Well done her for fighting it but no one should have to go through this

This generation of AI tooling will not change the CI/CD process. People will continue setting up dominos of shell scripts and using triggers to knock them over.

I don’t understand how they thoroughly messed up the widely used software that opens PDFs? Like as apps go this one is pretty close to “you had one job”???

Subsidising energy consumption in the face of both a short-term supply shock and the long-term need to decarbonise. Bad for the economy, bad for the planet, bad for the world's poor. And *if* you favour a wealth tax (I am sceptical but there's a case) spending it on *this" is just idiotic.

A senior staff scientist at Google’s artificial intelligence laboratory DeepMind, Alexander Lerchner, argues in a new paper that no AI or other computational system will ever become conscious.

my frustration with the verb "democratize" is reaching a stage that can only be resolved by writing a big dumb paper about it

Today will forever be remembered for this world record broken in London

Just to reiterate something that @ali-alkhatib.com says continuously -- to reframe AI as a political project and not as a technology.

Huh? OK, how about this. You can have my VSCode config for $1 million?

sometimes you just have to go all-caps in the headline www.theverge.com/podcast/9170...

ok the Mr. Beast lawsuit, let’s go. step 1: don’t do this, or this, or this, or this

If a party talked about "educating the public" today, they'd be monstered as "elitist" and "patronising". The language of education has been replaced with that of consumerism, in which "the customer is always right". The "focus group" has replaced the "pulpit". It's not been a positive change. 2/2

Very good piece by @tobyn.bsky.social on falling (earnings) inequality www.ft.com/content/8f27...

The rise in climate pollution from the US is 2025 canceled out the reductions from China, India, Japan, and the EU combined.