conservative free speech is when they speak and you listen or suffer the consequences

Until we figure out how France and Italy spend their smaller budgets so much more effectively than us, posturing around spending ‘2/3/5% of GDP’ is very annoying. Treasury bad but MoD also seem spectacularly shit. French military today on 2.1% of GDP is the one we want from 3% in 2035 FFS.

"they say we're running out of helium, but as we all know, it's the second most abundant element in the universe"

stargate is dead - or more operatively never actually existed. Norway was never happening. Next up on the deathwatch is Stargate Argentina, which was only ever a letter of intent. Also fair to ask whether OpenAI ever takes Oracle's data centers. www.wheresyoured.at/hatersguide-...

30 years ago today, Principal Skinner purchased fast food to disguise as his own cooking at an unforgettable luncheon with Superintendent Chalmers. #TheSimpsons episode “22 Short Films About Springfield” first aired April 14, 1996.

The problem with cars in six books. A special selection of books to help you learn everything you need to know about cars and climate change. #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #GlobalWarming yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/04/the-...

:sobbing: the taxation of trade routes is in dispute ::

Scientists have been working very hard and have finally achieved what many thought impossible: a Mail Online comments section defending a Labour MP.

Current status of the Strait of Hormuz dispute

The WSJ piece is a truly horrifying read, and I’m not sure I can recommend it; it needs a content warning klaxon. But if you have any doubts about how dangerous these things are, for adults *and* kids, or if you think their spongy ‘guardrails’ actually hold, it will clear that right up for you.

When Angela Rayner underpaid £40,000 stamp duty on her flat, Richard Tice said it was "morally completely indefensible” and she should immediately resign if she had “any moral decency”. Now we learn he personally made £91,000 in excess payments by failing to pay the tax his company legally owed

For my first column as Observer economics editor, I've written about the folly of calling for blanket price subsidies during a global energy shortage. It doesn't seem to be online so if you want to read in full, you'll have to go out and buy a physical paper, like in the good old days.

Just a bad time for these to be your top 2, honestly

I agree with this but also remember the extremely vocal part of the audience that screams "bad writing" if anything is left as an exercise for the reader. Lura Thok is a prime example, there was no immediate memory alpha infodump about how you can have a female Jem'Hadar so "bad writing".

"if you were in charge of star trek, what would you do?" Genuinely, just do another TNG. Pick a time period, introduce a ship with all new characters, minimize connections to the larger franchise, and hire a bunch of young sci-fi writers to come up with vexing moral dilemmas.

all the crew members have exited the vehicle, feeling well, and are even eating a little food.

AI footage in the quote post. However it's a real fact, with real footage available (See my link below). Now people who believed it have a false image of how octopus act, and people who recognise it as AI question a real observed scientific fact. Utter bullshit. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN9B...

I don't know how to explain to the people who pop up when creatives complain about "AI" to say there are legit uses for it just how much they sound like someone saying "Well actually fire is used to make bread" when people are talking about an organized arson ring burning down their fucking houses

Star Trek: Lower Decks lasted longer than the confederacy

Images you can hear, sci-fi edition:

At the heart of this argument is the idea that this spending doesn't reflect how people "actually" get around but people actually get around in the ways they are enabled to do so. If there's little or no bike infrastructure then few or no people will cycle.

"In Oxford, similarly, the council pushed ahead with implementation and people have come round to the LTNs. According to research by Oxford Brookes University, twice as many people are strongly in favour of them as are strongly opposed."

Schools are like "hey lock up your cell phones they're too damaging to the learning process. now please open up your lying plagiarism machine and start generating content"

I am completely onboard with books being the best but I also own and cherish a Kindle and actually, if I were in power and breaking up monopolies, I'd force Amazon to spin-off Kindle as its own company.

Bloody hell. Researchers invented a disease, published two fake papers to see if LLM’s would ingest them and kick them up as fact — and then it broke containment and all the major AI’s bought in. Information pollution. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

over at the newsletter I wrote about Sam Altman and how the tech press is obsessed with mythologizing unethical assholes

Americans will be like "don't walk 5 miles it'll ruin your knees"

Happy Appomattox Day to all that celebrate

David Duchovny played a transgender woman, Denise, on Twin Peaks in 1990 and when greeting Cooper, the show's protagonist, she says, "I prefer Denise, if you don't mind" and Cooper responds with "OK" and her identity is settled within a couple seconds and was a non-issue, 36 years ago.

Like Chernobyl 🤦

I am a fast walker and even I'm looking at that pace and wondering if he kept that up the whole way because damn.

End me

Look, this is a grey squirrel of a solecism and I hate it. The correct expression is ALL MOUTH AND TROUSERS, implying front, bravado, brashness with nothing of substance within. The needful idiom here is ALL GONG AND NO DINNER. Something that promises much but delivers nothing.

"I think there's a small but real chance he's eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff- or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer."

Classics friends may enjoy this. Some of the Latin pronunciation is a bit weird, but the essence is spot on! 😆

Trump is getting roasted all over. Spain’s PM:

🫡🇪🇺

Putting aside Sam Altman just continuing to emit huge lies constantly, this is an amazing example of what I mean when I talk about how GenAI is replacing *extremely low energy* digital tasks with *WAY WAY HIGHER ENERGY* replacements that *do not even work* Why TF is anyone using ChatGPT as a timer!

How it feels doing literally any task right now.

Whether it's Trump threatening a nuclear war on Truth Social or Hillary Clinton sharing risotto recipes by email, both leaders made controversial use of digital communication.

Starting a signs of play thread. We’re always hearing about how children don’t play outside anymore, but that’s not the whole story. Cycling often takes you through neighbourhoods where there is no through traffic. This is where you’re most likely to see signs of play.

something strange and horrible and somehow fitting that we should have a very real threat of madman civilizational destruction at the very moment when we also have humans on the dark side of the moon taking pictures that show how small, precious, and beautiful our world and existence is

"Best actor who did a great job despite them obviously being the affordable alternative to the actor the production actually wanted"

Yeah, well it's not so great down here either, ABC News.

The whole world now hoping that Trump listens to the sage counsel of Alex Jones.

Macos: i have no idea where your document is Windows: “your” document? These are onedrive’s documents Linux: /opt/fakevm/mounted/tmpfs/vmlinuz/ubuntu-36.0.01_x86_also-arm.0.21.013/snapd/docx-exporter.sx/0028492748901.txt.converted.bak/v/9/ms/1/0.out

BBC push notifications are wild right now. Half of them about the President of the United States threatening to erase an entire country from existence and the other half about the latest predicament Kanye West has gotten into.

I got quite haughtily told by a fellow Lib Dem that ACTUALLY fuel companies have said there are no shortages on the horizon so this is a good policy and yet here we are, five days later, with the first images of petrol stations closed due to lack of fuel beginning to grace the web.

feel like as millennials we kept being told that sure, the economy was bad but at least we'd never had to spend any time in a world where it felt like major, global, maybe even nuclear conflict could erupt at any moment and well well well: who's laughing now

"Thank you Houston, instruments went a little funny just now but we're in the green. Please tell President Harris we're on our way home."