There’s a good chance the British Prime Minister’s main adviser on AI is an OpenAI shareholder - but the government refuses to say whether she is. 🧵 1/5

"Add it all up, and time is not on the data center's side. The finance guru estimates that the 'AI datacenters to be built in 2025 will suffer $40 billion of annual depreciation, while generating somewhere between $15 and $20 billion of revenue.'" #econsky futurism.com/data-centers...

My latest @newscientist.com cartoon. p.s. my new book of science cartoons 'Physics for Cats' is out now! Order from your local bookshop or online: www.tomgauld.com

Drax received logs from cutblocks in BC containing 90% old growth forest, a Canadian investigation found. So it’s receiving £2m a day in UK green energy subsidies to burn old growth forest 🤔 www.theguardian.com/business/202...

When you repeatedly measure the positions of over a billion stars so accurately that you can see a star moving by an amount equal to the size of a pinhead on the Moon, as seen from Earth... you find amazing things! It's great. mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosb...

This story. Bloody hell. www.sheffieldtribune.co.uk/a-london-law...

🔥 Bonfire in the Grassmarket, 1952. Not for the 5th of November, but for Victoria Day, Edinburgh's discretionary local public holiday, traditionally held on the last Monday in May on or before her birthday on the 24th.

You’ve heard of the Unix 2038 Problem.
 I bet you haven’t heard of the GPS 2038 problem.
 Every GPS navigation device in existence experiences an integer overflow every 19.6 years.
 Last time, it wiped out iPhones, NOAA weather buoys, and a number of flights in China:

CROSSED LINES, INTENSE PRESSURE, SPURTLE DERAILED.—Reader's letter: www.broughtonspurtle.org.uk/letters/cros... #Edinburgh #hyperlocal #news #railwayhistory

There can't be many TV series that are invariably listed as "political thriller" which also happen to be an ecological warning wrapped in a detective story about a good man who's done a bad thing in a world where the mystical and paranormal coexist.

so @matteowong.bsky.social & I wrote on data centers: arguably the most important buildings in the world & are, in a way, holding the economy hostage. Byzantine financial instruments, private equity, depreciating tech, hype, $trillion valuations. it’s all there. an ai crash prob starts here.

In today’s Russian papers: nuclear-powered cruise missiles, poisonous snakes and economic pressures: “Russian industry is balancing on the verge of an all-industry collapse.” #ReadingRussia

In an obscure corner of Kazakhstan, the remains of an ocean millions of years old have created probably the most surreal landscape on earth -- as captured by photographer Daniel Kordan mymodernmet.com/daniel-korda...

FILM ALERT! Seas of the Sun – The Story of the Cluster Mission. You can watch it live on @esa.int's Youtube channel next week, October 30th, from 18:00 GMT / 19:00 CET where we’ll be joined by the people behind Cluster in a live chat accompanying the film. #ESAcluster #spacerocks #seasofthesun

One of my favourite hidden treasures of #Edinburgh and @edinburgh-uni.bsky.social is this 11th century Swedish runestone, to be found tucked in behind one of the main teaching buildings on George Square. Most people seem to walk past it and don’t notice…

This is probably your best reminder that Amazon Web Services is too big. So is Microsoft, and Google, and all of these companies that are gobbling up money, energy, and resources, only for things to go suddenly arse-up, like today, without being held accountable. There's no space for competition.

The main achievement of the tech industry has been increasing the flow of money from people who make or do things to people who already have more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes

DDR5 is unstable garbage. 
Max out your memory channels? Flaky. Temperature a bit too hot? Silent Throttle with no logs. Too “Dense” of a stick? Good luck training. Last gen was rock solid by comparison. Here's what happened.

This story from @bondhack.ft.com and the FT is amazing, one of the best pieces of financial journalism I’ve ever read www.ft.com/content/8373...

Cardiff will be the first UK city to introduce a surcharge for oversized SUVs and trucks, "while very large vehicles – those over 3,500kg – will be excluded from residential permits entirely."

this isn't really a way out of the issue, which is simply that the thing that makes the guard loyal to you evaporates the moment the apocalypse happens bsky.app/profile/bert...

Edinburgh New Town October twilight

18 Rankeillor Street, Edinburgh—built around 1820. Eight flats in the stair, over two ground-floor flats. Notable former residents include:

Working on a new unified search interface today. Beautiful warm sunshine here

An observation test for you - for your inner 8 year-old “The artist has hidden 12 things in this picture. How many can you find?” Treasure magazine, 1964 Official answers coming soon (Even if you don’t reply, could you please ‘like’ or share this one? 🙏)

When the power went out in Spain this spring, many people immediately pointed the finger at the country's solar and wind power as the cause. That wasn't the trigger, but a new survey finds that all that misinformation? It had an impact. Read more here, only on @npr.org 🎧⬇️

Crypto lending — a major factor in the 2022 crypto meltdown — is having a comeback. In fact, one crypto lender just hired the guy accused of bankrupting BlockFi after he extended a huge line of credit to FTX based on a pinky swear.

This is Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and considered to be the first person to write a computer programme which was for Babbage's Analytical Machine. She died in 1842 In her honour, today is Ada Lovelace Day and is all about encouraging women and girls in mathematics, science and engineering.

🧠 Alzheimer’s reversed in mice A new study found that injecting nanoparticles can 'remind' the blood–brain barrier to function properly again, restoring normal brain activity in mice. Human trials could follow within years. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #SciComm #Alzheimers 🧪

Asteroid 2025 TF flew over Antarctica at 00:47:26 UTC ± 18 s on 1 October, coming as close as 428 ± 7 km to Earth’s surface. This is a similar altitude to the orbit of the International Space Station, and one of the closest approaches ever recorded. www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed...

"Total AI capex is projected to exceed $500 billion in 2026 and 2027—roughly the annual GDP of Singapore. Meanwhile, American consumers spend only $12 billion a year on AI services—roughly the GDP of Somalia." www.derekthompson.org/p/this-is-ho...

My new book of science cartoons, PHYSICS FOR CATS is out in a week! Order a copy today from you local bookshop or at one of the links here: www.tomgauld.com/comic-books-v2

like every upside at this point is some tepid convenience and the downside attached to it is like here have a fascist dictatorship panopticon under a burning sky patrolled by killbots

A bus of Bronx middle schoolers pulled up to the Capitol this morning for a long-planned field trip just a few hours after the government shut down. All Capitol tours were cancelled as the guides can’t work in shutdown. So I escorted them in myself and gave them a personal tour. They were great!

Wednesday’s @thetimes.com cartoon times.newsprints.co.uk/morten-morla...

This only happens to you once

Becoming increasingly clear we’re gonna have to build a parallel infrastructure for all the media we really love. The reason all of this is happening under the color of law is hyperconsolidation, dissent being traded straight up for merger approval, or fear of harassment.

utter dream home in mexico city IG casitamxhome

Remember: there's no audience for AI-produced content. Nobody in the AI ecosystem is there to read or listen - only to publish their own slop.

This woman will be protected by generations of crows h/t: Autumn Buck / firstdatejunkie

#GoneFishing Series 8 is officially done & dusted and will be entering your eyeballs soon, courtesy of BBC2 and iPlayer! A lovely bunch of varied locations, weather and fish. Plenty of Ted, Paul shouting “don’t wind” & yes, Bob might fall over….

I enjoyed this. And what an infectious laugh. ❤️ "Reporter left speechless after witnessing Japan's new $70 million Maglev train in action at 310 mph"

This is some of the hardest shit I've seen in my life

In China, they've built a 35-meter plexiglass sphere full of 20,000 tonnes of a strange liquid, 700 meters underground, to measure the entries in a certain 3×3 matrix. It's gonna be great. mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosb...

We Have AI Now www.youtube.com/shorts/8-lgJ...

Astronomers have found a truly huge black hole, 36 billion times heavier than the Sun, in a galaxy that has eaten all its neighbors. And that's a peek into our own future. First our galaxy will hit Andromeda.... johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2025/08/16/t...

It makes me happy that Mars has water, like this fog in Vallis Marineris - a canyon 10 times longer, 20 times wider and 5 times deeper than the Grand Canyon. Just a foggy day down there!

That Trivago advert running in the UK right now has some serious uncanny valley shit going on with the AI modified mouths (I guess used when they dubbed the language). Hate it.