By this logic, can we get our American colonies back? Is it cool if the crown owns part of the US again?

This is very good

America didn’t win WWII.

Indeed behind the scenes, even back in 2020, this was seen as the biggest "secret" win (and why there was a focus on trade vehicle upgrade schemes). You can't stop white van man banging on angrily about a muslim mayor. But you can force him to do it while driving a lower emission van.

ULEZ means about 1,500 sq kilometres - the whole of Greater London - is covered by road emissions control. Stop and think about that for a second. It's incredible. Its impact on public health has been huge. Studies said it would take 200 YEARS to reach this emission level. Khan did it in five.

🥪 Just over a week to go until Crisp Sandwich Day! @theshirkersrest.bsky.social has been a great supporter of it, if you’re in London do pop along on the 25th for a drink and a crisp sandwich (free bread/spread/sauces), their upstairs crisp event has already sold out though vole.wtf/crisp-sandwi...

Tales of "the thing that mimics a human, but isn't" are as old as humanity itself And they are *always* a danger. Always.

I really believe generative AI is a cognitohazard to an entire column of humanity. I don't know, there's a something it fucking does to people that displaces their own entirely-capable cognition and independence, further they seemingly cannot perceive the deficits of. This is not a moral argument.

Early in my transition an older punk cis guy gruffly told me that he may not get every term right but he would fuck up any bigot who threatened me. He remains a dear friend. Most of the liberals who made a point of emphasizing how valid I was went terf the moment I contradicted them on anything.

@histoftech.bsky.social didn’t know you were visiting

Disappoints who, exactly? I personally am fucking delighted. Couldn’t happen to a worthier leading man.

I think what's impressive about TRON is that, visually, it's still so much more interesting than any of it's sequels. It's crazy that they tried update this digital world by making it as 'realistically rendered' as possible. It's a complete misunderstanding of the original's charm.

This, but Lego’s 928 Galaxy Explorer, is my childhood desire I didn’t get until about five years ago. Friend of mine bought it for my birthday after an offhand comment I made. I don’t dare to think how much she spent on it, box and all.

“More than 30” as the top band, Great Maker am I an outlier. My phone: 449. My iPad Mini: across five windows, 300+ total. My Mac Studio: cannot be bothered to count, about fifty windows, maybe 40 or 50 in each, many more closed tab groups that I reopen when needed. Tabs galore.

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

There's always a baked in assumption that they'll get to be the served, not the servant.

When you could code silly quizzes on Facebook, it was FULL of "what would you be in medieval times?!" etc. I made one that nearly always answered "died as a child", "died in childbirth", "lived and died as a servant" People got SUPER mad with it. Everyone assumes they'll be at the top of the tree

Most talented creative people won’t do right-wing content, so they see AI as a handy “fuck you, we don’t need any of you” thing

as a girl with a PhD in natural language processing and machine learning it's actually offensive to me when you say "we don't know how LLMs work so they might be conscious" I didn't spend 10 years in mines of academia to be told ignorance is morally equal knowledge. We know exactly how LLMs work.

In honor of National Poetry Day, the greatest parody rewrite of all time:

“hidden”

I’ve done this. It’s how I discovered my favourite whisky. Can recommend.

Okay, the new Rhubarb and Custard and Lemon Sherbert flavours from Candy Kittens are almost good enough for me to forgive them for nixing Blood Orange. Almost.

Yep, if you find yourself starting projects & never finishing them, the projects are TOO BIG You have to let go of grand ambitions and scale way down, even if that means doing things that seem tiny/trivial

Interesting read and I am surprised that I’ve had a pint in all but one!

*ahem*

As awful and as craven as this is, I draw a minuscule amount of solace from the NYT describing it as the “men’s” World Cup.

15/ Part of the reason we are in this mess today is because tech "critics" can get very rich and successful by conveniently ignoring the ugliest realities of Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, writers like Paulina—who challenge power rather than serve it—end up out in the cold.

10/ Instead of centering men who missed the boat (and still don't seem to get it), let's lift up the work of Paulina Borsook, who saw it all very clearly and tried to warn us 25 years ago. Someone should do a profile of her very interesting life. And hey, let's drop some cash into her GoFundme!

It's just really funny that they trained their LLMs on the entire corpus of human knowledge and they're consistently annoyed with each fresh discovery that reality has a left-wing bias.

I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again. Ignore the haters, London is the 🐐

We're at the point where the Trump does something worse than Watergate daily, often multiple times a day. And none of it makes news; it's just normal now.

Ok, so like, everyone does realize that his brain confused “seeking asylum” for “insane asylum” and he just stuck with it, right?

My favourite fact about Iceland is that we have many, many crime writers but only one forensic pathologist, and he was so busy answering all of their questions that he decided to have a small seminar for writers to get some peace. It immediately sold out so he had another one that also sold out.

I really enjoyed KPop Demon Hunters but I would very much like to read the Korea Office of Civil Aviation (KOCA) investigation into what happened to that private jet

I loved learning about a supposed “video game crash” nearly forty years later, given I lived through the era and happily bought new games every few weeks to play to death on my Spectrum.

Idly considering buying a bunch of crisps* in this week’s shop to do a crisp sandwich off in the run up to crisp sandwich day. * like, more than I normally do, and I say this as someone who Ocado awarded the person buying more bags of salt and vinegar crisps than anyone in South London

I follow a lot of TTRPG people and I got to “far-left” before clocking that this wasn’t about TTRPGs. Superb.

Douze points to Spain. How anyone can have watched ANY of Eurovision and claim it is apolitical I just do not know. www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

All these Tory MPs switching to Reform.

Larry Tesler, inventor of the cut, copy, and paste commands, dies at 74

Eurovision? You mean the musical contest set up in the aftermath of the Second World War explicitly to foster peace between European nations by cooperating on a shared broadcast? That Eurovision? It’s totally about politics. Peace is a political stance. As is war. As is doing a genocide.

This may explain why there’s an aggressive response to people who merely post Kirk’s own words. It threatens the existence of the alternate Kirk - the motivational speaker that had been marketed to young kids and white Christian groups through selective quotation & clips.

Can't believe it's been 26 years since our slag moon hurtled out of the solar system it still freaks my nut out to this day.

I’ve been online since 1990, the computer madness washed over me long ago and just became part of everything

Once again, Teen Vogue out here committing actual journalism.

I miss the iPod touch.

Makin’ gumbo