Who else remembers that part of the high court ruling that the then PM Theresa May couldn’t use Crown Prerogative involved explaining the rule of law to the Tories way back in idk, 2018?

The sheer audacity of the British political/media class, to lecture the public on racism and inflammatory and reckless conduct. The titanium balls required, to drag out *Amber Rudd* to lecture protestors.

like, it's been an hour long struggle to get one of two children dressed and now the youngest is flat out refusing any clothes so our plans to go out are just like.. well okay I guess we're staying in and I'm going to try and work instead???

I'm finding everything a lot right now at home with the kids and fuck all support except my already hugely overburdened partner and it's just... so fucking hard to find bandwidth to think, to attend, to witness, to acknowledge, to advocate, against a backdrop of this season of my kids childhood

Whatever your view on anything, if you don’t realise that initiatives like this spring from an impulse to authoritarianism, you’re deluding yourself I think. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Men in balaclavas set fire to a mosque in East Sussex last night. It's only appearing on the BBC's local coverage, rather than its main national headlines, despite coming just a week after the (also under-reported) firebombing of an asylum hotel in London last week www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Does anyone have a non paywalled version of this please?

🫡

In his newsletter, @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social plugs Keidrick Roy’s American Dark Age: “I just loved American Dark Age. . . .I appreciated Roy’s excavation of the Black liberal tradition in American thought—giving voice to a group whose ideas deserve a renewed look in our own anti-democratic moment.”

“Oh that? That’s just the front room potato”

meanwhile I chaired an academic talk this week (my first time doing this!) and I enjoyed it a lot and it made me miss using my brain for scholarship and inquiry vs team leadership and sales and marketing and product development and mothering

reaching another point where work feels unsustainable, where it’s impossible to squeeze all the things that need to happen (now inc primary school tours) into two days a week, where I’m pouring myself into this biz for not enough return, OR maybe it’s a double jab thurs w no rest & the luteal phase

“fix the automated email sequence for the new event offering sign up page and then write an email” how about you go dance with penguins instead muhfuh

hello I would like to just hang out and chat shit rather than “get dressed” and “take my children out somewhere”

Zombies, they're making themselves zombies

productive discussion about AI in classes w colleagues today. one thing that was clarified for me: while so much attention has been on instructors making AI-proof writing assignments the use of AI to "summarize" readings (often wrongly) seems more pervasive & hard to root out

“Why don’t you just verify your ID? Just send them your passport/face scan/credit card, what could go wrong? It’s perfectly safe you’re just paranoid” etc etc etc

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later. harpers.org/archive/1941...

operation… Plato?

I had the worst lunch. Honestly. Maybe @bbcnewsnight.bsky.social could cover the rise in the far right, in racist attacks and, you know, the effect on millions of British people instead of platforming them every night I'd settle for @theguardian.com doing even basic coverage of racism in the UK

My book is about how Nazis got power, how they kept it, & how to fight it—how we fought it then, how we can now. Nazis weren’t a foregone conclusion. They were not inevitable. They want you to think so—convince you they already won so you quit fighting. Because they know they can’t win otherwise.

Keir Starmer can fuck off

Today’s @404media.co newsletter on dozens of cases of US lawyers using AI in court briefs which produce fabrications, faked citations and confabulations confirms that this happens even with most university’s “approved AI” of choice, MS Co-Pilot!!!

A new study, based on a survey of 1,150 workers suggests that the injection of AI tools into the workplace has not resulted in a magic productivity boom and instead increased the amount of time that workers say they spend fixing low-quality AI-generated “work.” 🔗 www.404media.co/ai-workslop-...

People on r/twinpeaks flooded the subreddit with AI slop images of FBI agent Dale Cooper and ChatGPT generated scripts after the community’s moderators opened the door to posting AI art. 🔗 www.404media.co/pissed-off-f...

Horrifying. And how does this work for someone who has spent time on a student visa, which do not require the holders to work?

Great bargain for all transcription needs! Spend your money wisely and ethically at the same time

Alright, I want to make sure my team are booked and busy this autumn and so I’m offering a special discount for Bsky users only Send us an enquiry via the web form or via email with the code ‘BSKYBELOVEDS’ for a tasty 15% discount off all interview, focus group, and workshop transcription services

Oooo

“And that’s why the commitment to truth telling, the commitment to building institutions that help us understand the harms of history, is such a priority.”

✨in other tarot news, I'm thinking of running a kickstarter (an actual one, on the KS website) to help pay for the reprint of the tarot deck, and also just to get it out there, raise its profile. Any hints or tips or advice from those who've run kickstarters before, or who support them, welcome!

Things I had not expected to see today: Deutsche Bank making a numbers based argument that "AI" is a bubble and won't last https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/deutsche-bank-grim-warning-ai-industry

"Data manipulation by the US Gov...makes crucial datasets untrustworthy and unusable. If the US Government secretly changes datasets for political reasons, researchers relying on the data might erroneously recommend ineffective or counterproductive interventions." www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

This is the most complete information I've seen about the Anthropic copyright settlement — dates of when things are likely to happen, what to do now, and what it all means for different types of writers. nwu.org/anthropic/

Not wholly surprising given that ChatGPT fabricates citations and publications out of whole cloth

CEO pay is up 1,094% since 1978, while worker pay is up just 26%. Why do we always hear "we can't afford to pay our workers more" but never "we can't afford to pay our CEO more"?

Every good programmer I know has been saying this to me for months; meanwhile every not-great programmer I know has been trying to outsource their work to ai, causing more issues/delays than they if did it themselves. A lot of these tools only seem good to people who are not great at their jobs.

📻👄 Guess who’s on the radio? I’m in the latest episode of Radiolab on voice radiolab.org

The whole concept of “earned” settlement or citizenship is deeply problematic, implying to people they’re only here on sufferance until proven otherwise, as well as suggesting there’s something uniquely & magically virtuous about UK society which means you have to be extra good to be part of it 🤷‍♂️

Just wasted a cup and a half of gifted Apple compote on some out of date coconut oil in a recipe blahhhh

My local Gail’s is the only place open from 7 on a Sunday and it’s 830am and it’s absolutely rammed, who are all these people up this early on a Sunday Also fuck Gail’s for having no gluten free/friendly options except a chocolate brownie

Got qualitative research data, workshops, conferences, podcasts, author dictated manuscripts or more that need transcription? My social enterprise has supported researchers at universities across the UK, US and Canada for almost a decade. Come check out our work and help support our mission!

This team does excellent work - my go to for transcript for research

meanwhile for today to happen I must clean up a load of cake detritus, two jigsaws, cake on a mini piano, two piles of laundry, clothe two kids and myself, make myself breakfast and lunch, make the kids a picnic, clean all the portable potty stuff and pack spare farm clothes and wellies and then go

Got qualitative research data, workshops, conferences, podcasts, author dictated manuscripts or more that need transcription? My social enterprise has supported researchers at universities across the UK, US and Canada for almost a decade. Come check out our work and help support our mission!

me: I will use this hour to drive sales into my business also me: but what about this sign up form I need for yesterday

Criticizing the enlightened centrist isn’t kicking them out of the so-called tent, it is presenting them with an opportunity to stop eroding the integrity of the tent by tirelessly trying to find commonality with people who want to burn the tent down.

had to turn the heating on for the first time in months! It begins

My latest column for the Chronicle of Higher Ed is now live. It's an argument for including AI-critical voices in campus conversations and policymaking workgroups, and I'm proud to get this dissenting piece into the mainstream genAI/higher ed discourse. Please read and share if you're so inclined 🙂