quelle surprise www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Parallel or "mixed member majoritarian" systems where voters cast a vote for a district seat and for proportional seats—but the PR seats don't compensate for district results—often result in high disproportionality like in this case when there's one dominant party and their opponents are fragmented

At the rate SpaceX's ambitions are receding, by 2030 they'll be promising to put a supertram service in Leeds

@adrianshort.uk saw this and thought of you

This morning, I got one of those scam emails that are currently abundant in the writing community, where someone offers to "feature" your book at a book club for a fee. These messages always include an effuse essay about how great your book is, written by a LLM.

Spanish PM Sanchez: "Social media has become a failed state, and when democracies start to impose order, their owners get nervous. We will move forward despite their threats."

Talking points from Moscow: How RT and the GRU set the agenda on German-language Telegram #Ukraine

Federal judge: "The presumption of regularity that has previously extended to [the United States Government] that it could be taken at its word—with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes—no longer holds." This is in a case where the Trump admin sued Oregon.

you don’t say. No one mention Spinvox

Update: FUCKING RODENT

so a month ago I was reading @markpackuk.bsky.social’s speech on Twitter in the lords and there were obviously fake stats the government used to justify Twitter’s UK reach and its continued importance to British audiences Rob has now found the source of the data was… Twitter

The U.S. State Department is set to fund MAGA-aligned think-tanks and charities across Europe to spread the Trump administration’s policy positions. We eagerly await the patriots'/sovereignists' strong indignation and their demands for investigations to be carried out! 🕵️

Meanwhile, on X (I'll spare you the screenshots) another social media induced diplomatic spat: The US ambassador to Poland has declared to cut off all contacts with the speaker of the Sejm because he refused to back nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Price. Donald Tusk has publicly pushed back.

Some sort of corporate sponsorship / naming rights type deal perhaps?

A new report shows the enormous pressure EU lawmakers are coming under from American big tech giants.

After this swam into my brain last night (unbidden, if you will, but clearly there are neural pathways that divert here at the slightest nudge), it occurred to me that a few people may not have experienced it. Put that hot drink down. Now. Yes before you start reading.

Didn't I say that getting rid of shortwave radio services was a very 1913 thing to be doing?

I just identified Jeffrey Epstein's Wikipedia account (I'll post a link here shortly)

Start stockpiling canned food. fortune.com/2026/02/04/j...

we don't really know why Bezos decided to fully give up on the project but it's not hard to sketch out an explanation. Owning the Post was supposed to give him a foothold in Washington. Instead it made him a target of the Trump administration and got him nothing during the Biden administration

We're building a machine that hallucinates and training it on deranged hallucinations to come up with even more unhinged hallucinations

To some extent it started to bother me that we're now ascribing everything bad to this select group who are we refer to as Epstein's friends, as if they're some sort of James Bond baddie cabal

Thinking of those relatively junior civil servants who were jailed for substantial periods for leaking information in return for relatively small amounts of reward during the hacking scandal.

On the sleight of hand that uses free speech as a diversion from questions of who controls the digital infrastructure of democracy and to what purpose. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

FT exclusive Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor discussed ways round restrictions on his making investments while an official UK trade representative and shared official documents from the role with Jeffrey Epstein, files released by the US Department of Justice show www.ft.com/content/6b2f...

sorry everyone we at pencil company know you liked pencils, but we can't think of any new ideas for them, so we're discontinuing pencils tomorrow. also, you won't be able to access all your pencil drawings, please burn them, cool

Still the greatest list ever complied.

Every time I'm tempted to start a podcast I remember why podcasts are terrible.

Perhaps the most egregious example of politics fawning on older voters while literally starving this country of its future

im building machines that i keep saying will both throw you out of work and allow masked special police forces in service to a lunatic i bought and paid for to recognize your face and check if i agree with your beliefs. im part of a pedophile ring that put this into motion. why are you rude to me

Paris prosecutors raid the offices of Elon Musk's X. www.reuters.com/world/europe...

The Soviet Union, of course, had no weapons or delivery systems to do anything like this in 1954

for connoisseurs of local journalism traffic farming, this is the latest frontier – you reprint ancient facts from Wikipedia and present them as news, in order to create curiosity gap headlines that appear in Google Discover / Apple News

We've updated our report - it's probably the most complete running list of Mandelson's email leaks: taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/02/02/m...

The funny part, or maybe not so funny: the court cases will take so long that we’ve got no idea what state EU-US relations or the world order are going to be in by the time we get to fines being paid. But maybe X gets banned in Europe then?

One of the misconceptions of the takeover as building a social media site (rather than a one person playground, or political project) was the focus on the experience of people who wanted to be heard, rather than people who wanted to read/consume.

Rather like the 'ID cards would stop the radical right' folks fail to take account of countries with both ID cards and a radical right

Also evidence that essentially eliminating irregular immigration - as Australia has - doesn't, by itself, stop the radical right.

Elon Musk is claiming he’s risked everything to protect kids from sexual abuse mere weeks out from laughing while his AI chatbot was generating nearly 8,000 sexual abuse images per hour that overwhelmingly targeted girls and young women

A JD Vance Presidency.

FIRST CLASS bit of archaeology here. Brilliant work.

Harvard professor Steven Levitsky, who studies democracy backsliding, on Don Lemon's arrest: “This is a new dimension. In democracies, journalists don't get arrested. In authoritarian regimes, journalists get arrested." More in @status.news: www.status.news/p/don-lemon-...

There is no constitutional prohibition on redacting a president’s name every time he’s mentioned in connection with a sex crime. So it’s hard to understand what th Democrat Party’s complaint is about the Epstein files. by Jonathan Turley

Catherine O’Hara, the comedian best known for her roles in “Home Alone,” “Schitt’s Creek” and “Beetlejuice,” and as a member of the influential Canadian sketch comedy series “S.C.T.V.,” has died. She was 71. nyti.ms/4qbsUMS

wonderful actor

Once again, extraordinary things happening on the social media of the German foreign ministry www.instagram.com/reel/DUGW47K...

Trump’s fundraisers are now using the threat of dispatching ICE against citizens as an email engagement tactic.

Exclusive: The Trump administration has held covert meetings with fringe separatists from the oil-rich Canadian province as a rift deepens between Washington and Ottawa. ft.trib.al/zYlleOJ

The President of the United States is apparently posting fake AI videos criticizing political opposition and if the news even bothers to report this the general reaction will be something like “oh yeah no surprise from Trump” he’s totally succeeded at flooding the zone with idiocy