Indeed. LLMs are LLMs. Machine learning is machine learning. AIs are Astro Boy, Robby the Robot, Cmdr Data, the Ghost in the Shell Puppet Master, etc. I will not use the term for anything less. Don’t feed the hype machine. Don’t call it AI.

A survivor from Grandpa’s library, Book of Kells by Edward Sullivan, 1914. A preview shorturl.at/xgDqE of Victoria Whitworth’s book about its origins (Pictish Portmahomack) led to opening at “plant forms of decoration”, “unknown in Celtic illuminated mss of the earlier period”. Now maybe, we know.

Kat is still out there fighting four hours after this. I'm just fucking livid.

If decent political being & doing relates to relating & adapting, then please relate & adapt swiftly to this www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Impunity rife all week and ubiquitously - BBC #laurak responds: Mandelson, Mandelson, Mandelson.

Our democracy is too precious to be a plaything for foreign tech barons. Elon Musk doesn’t care about the British people or our rights. He only cares about himself and his ego.

When the National Front and BNP used to march they were rightly presented as racist pariahs by nearly all media organisations. Now the far right are treated as if overt racism and calling for mass deportations, including of British citizens, is a legitimate argument. Sadly this includes the BBC.

British right-wing politicians and their press allies are going to lionise someone most have never heard of & they won’t repeat what he actually said

Could we please stop pretending that the flags being hung from streetlamps or painted on roundabouts are innocent expressions of patriotic pride? This is the far right marking out its territory. It uses these flags to intimidate its traditional victims and opponents. 🧵1/3

The grift goes on. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Our new piece w/ @evidentmedia.org came out right after the Supreme Court lifted restrictions in LA to allow ICE to stop anyone they suspect is an immigrant. Being brown and speaking Spanish is enough to get stopped in LA. Legally. Traffic stops in DC can mean you get detained. This is today.

Build council homes. Treat people with dignity. The threat isn't the migrants - it's the wealth of the super rich. And the media outlets and the politicians who protect their power.

Lucy Connolly, jailed for urging people to set fire to hotels housing refugees, is speaking at the Reform party conference today. All the worst people.

Little kids with brain cancer. That’s who Donald Trump and RFK Jr. are screwing over by cutting health care.

The Tories can get IN the sea. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"Erupt across UK" is a crazily inaccurate ITV news headline for a patchy smattering of protests eg 150-250 people in Orpington, Horley & Cheshunt; a peak yesterday 300 in Mold; & outnumbered by counterprotests in Liverpool, Bristol and Perth ITV should report accurately, not invent "erupts"

#Debussy pursued 'a dream of vitrified improvisation', said #Boulez - one of my favourite Boulez remarks. To celebrate Debussy's birthday, here's Boulez conducting Jeux: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jhbf...

Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory." - Claude Debussy

The meeting was a disaster for everyone except two people. Trump got his photo op and his ego boost. Putin got his photo op, whitewashing of war crimes and no sanctions. No one in Ukraine, Europe or the United States benefited in any way.

New YouGov polling. A monumental failure of our political class to educate, a monumental failure of our media to report fairly, for a generation

The US government has sent innocent men to be beaten and raped in a foreign gulag www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

"Addressing real psychological & sociological needs is something those false, misinformed beliefs are doing. We actually need to try to tackle the underlying social problems, like alienation, people are grappling with" My in-depth essay with brilliant insights from LSE's Prof J McKenzie Alexander ⬇️

At St Mary’s Binsted, nr Arundel, Grade 2* listed marvel of 1860s restoration.

All Saints, Minstead. Carving on grave of esteemed serpent player Thomas Maynard d. 1817 aged 27. www.westgallerychurches.com Similar carving in Boston USA. Members of Boston Symphony Orchestra played homage here 25 years ago, so the graveyard keepers told me.

Historian @adapalmer.bsky.social discusses her book ‘Inventing the Renaissance’ and what we can learn from the time-period.

As these political and personal purges continue, important agencies will become unable to perform their basic functions, and at some point will only be able to spread the purges into the larger society. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/good...

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

Wrote a thing: ...at the heart of it is another Trumpian Big Lie, that immigrants are a burden and menace. We need to fight the false story with a true one: this country needs its immigrants and they are a blessing and an enrichment of what this country is and in many ways its heart and soul.

The president of Aix-Marseilles University is welcoming US scientific refugees.He "likened the situation to that of European academics who fled persecution by Nazi Germany both before and during World War II" www.politico.eu/article/meet...

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates.” –Justice Sonia Sotomayor. One of the most chilling sentences I have ever read.

This is a really important story: on the danger of believing your own conspiracy theories. Iran did. Is the US next? www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

People in wheelchairs are getting arrested right now in the Russell Senate Office Building in DC. They showed up to tell Congress not to cut their Medicaid, because they cant afford health care without it. If you look closely you can see the zip ties on their hands. #WeWontGetOverLosingMedicaid

“A fraught time ahead of us” quips @bbc Laura K after I slept thru most of her show. What other whiplash event have I just missed?

We may be witnessing the most globally embarrassing thing ever to happen to the United States.

Honestly I still can’t stop laughing 😂😅🤣

MAGA operates inside a disordered discourse, explained in detail in the below presentation. A key trait? Dissent isn’t tolerated. Internal criticism is treated as betrayal. That’s central to understanding how MAGA undermines the VDA pillars. bsky.app/profile/elio...

Incredibly touched to be mentioned here with such empathy by Kate Blincoe - Country diary: My fear is that one year the swifts will not return | Birds | The Guardian Country diary: My fear is that one year the swifts will not return www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Labour is handing this country on a silver platter to Reform. People do not vote Labour because they hate immigrants and want Reform-lite. They vote Labour because they want it to make a positive difference to their lives.

#OTD in 1912, RMS Titanic sank in icy waters on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. Amongst those who perished, the band who played as the ship went down. It was the inspiration for Gavin Bryars' 1972 work, The Sinking of the Titanic. open.spotify.com/album/0KJ4na... #britsymphyear

Wonderful listening #Boulezat100 @bbcradio3.bsky.social - no pipe and carpet slippers - just like it used to be 1965-1975

Europeans should take over Radio Free Europe if Trump cuts it - because Europe will need more than just weapons to defend itself, writes @peterpomerantsev.bsky.social on.ft.com/42hSOEO

Let it begin.

We live in what has been an exceptionally stable country, but it's just been destabilized. In that instability is possibility--not to return to the world of January 19th, 2025, but to something other than this rampage of hate and destruction, this oligarchs against everything coup. If we seize it.

Here's what the idiots in the White House utterly fail to comprehend. They and the US came out of that argument weaker. Zelensky came out stronger, with Europe rallying behind Ukraine more than before. They came out looking like petulant idiots; he came out looking like a leader with integrity.

Here I react to the shameful encounter between American leaders and media and the Ukrainian president. No doubt there were more, but I saw five failures on our side: of hospitality, decency, democracy, strategy, and independence. Please watch and share. snyder.substack.com/p/five-failu...

Please share this fact sheet on Ukraine with anyone who needs it understandingwar.org/backgrounder...

“We have power, and our power arises when we connect” Rebecca Solnit’s essential antidote to the Mump plague. meditationsinanemergency.com

The spinelessness of some of the richest baronies in history is extraordinary. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...