First day of 2025 vs last day of 2025.

if you can't afford clothes, it's not clothing poverty, it's poverty. If you can't afford sanitary protection, it's not period poverty, it's poverty. Divvying up poverty into little bits hides the fact that poverty is poverty and gives right-wingers an in to say "poor people need to budget better."

Fascinating thread but I don't feel it's that complicated? This is what happens when you go out of your way to performatively kick your own coalition in the hope of impressing voters who never liked you to start with.

Joining everybody else in pointing out that there is absolutely nothing "mind boggling" about this. This is exactly what everybody predicted would happen when the Labour party lurched rightwards. Anybody surprised by this, or pretending to be surprised by this, is a moron.

I hate these charts so much because they imply chatgpt is comparable to the internet or phones You could create the same graphic for full screen pop-up advertising on websites and make them look like ultra-rapid technology adoption when really they were just baked unavoidably into the internet

I already agree with this in principle - citizenship is an untouchable status or it is nothing - but also for reasons of prudence. “The Home Sec can revoke citizenship when he/she deems someone’s online output sufficiently offensive” is a v dangerous precedent to set with Reform leading all polls.

James Cameron talking like they might not makes more Avatars and he'll have to resort to podcasts or novels because this one might not make $2 billion is really weird. Who is he kidding? Who is it aimed at?

they have designed these machines to simulate human agents and they are constantly pitching the idea that these machines really *are* agents, but when one of these machines kills a person they say “you can’t hold them to account, they’re just machines, read the instructions”

Hard to argue with Star Trek being ranked as a loser of 2025, but also quite sad. There has scarcely been a better time for it but the previous Paramount regime just didn't know what to do with it and I don't see the new Trump-friendly one doing any better. www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/hollyw...

So far, the only outlet that has an accurate Brigitte Bardot obit headline is @aljazeera.com:

I'm unconvinced that car makers have seen the light. Touchscreen are cheap to design and implement. It's long proven that car companies have to be mandated to make things safer. They won't do so otherwise.

Right I listen to a lot of podcasts and I will die on this hill, podcasting should be audio only. The second you even include video as an output stream you're no longer a podcast and you will degrade the experience for listeners even without meaning to.

Honestly also the brass neck of this paper, which cheered this asymmetric trade deal at the time and advocated that Liz Truss, the Cabinet minister who signed it should become *prime minister*.

Happy 14th anniversary to this youtube video

Congestion Charge results: * Vehicle traffic down * Pollution down * Foot traffic up * Better public transport Sounds familiar, but this is New York, one year on, not Oxford.

In my view SNW had the opportunity to tell new stories with a mix of original characters and unexplored legacy characters in an accessible way but has come down with a classic case of prequelitis. search.app/TF3sp

Also, trail hunting *is* a smokescreen for illegal fox hunting. Literally everyone knows this.

I will keep saying this. If you bought a calculator and it EVEN ONCE told you 2+2=5, you’d throw it out and demand a refund. If you had an employee who lied confidently to you, and was easily caught, you’d fire them. LLMs are the untrustworthy calculator and the confident liar. Fire them.

A related issue is LLMs take the enjoyable work of discovery and learning an turn it into administrative work of verifying everything. The characteristics of the work change into something many of us tolerate more than enjoy. If I wanted to be a fact checker I would have become a fact checker.

Symptomatic of the fact that just about every positive use case for it represents a minor convenience, at best. Things you could already do fairly easily but (maybe) a bit faster so they've just resorted to brow-beating.

important

December 20th. A partially rubberised torso stands on the corner of Edward Street and screams for thirty seconds before vanishing.

Everywhere you look in London it's REALLY festive this year. I genuinely pity the "they've cancelled Christmas" lot. Like a Milli Vanilli* tribute act they've got nothing to work with

"we only use AI for coming up with ideas" no you don't. you use AI to come up with the a bland version of other people's ideas. there is currently NOBODY more replaceable than you

wow, great question:

It is infuriating that not only is this tone & quality of debate Lords make but also is entirely predictable from a former head of Met police. We have huge numbers of drivers on our streets driving illegally, without any enforcement, and millions nationwide without licence, insurance &/or MOT etc.

settling on that as their catch phrase obvs shows the abuser mentality but also contributes to the backlash imo. nothing is forever and you aren't inevitable, dorkass wannabe movie villains

people like to hate on gen AI but it’s a vital tool if you’re a struggling business that can’t afford to hire an editor

there are no limits to what you can do with a car and still be allowed to drive again one day

I was looking for the interview where she gushed about DS9 and...thanks AI overview, really helpful.

AI "news" is so fucking awful. Seattle Bike Blog has great search engine karma, so we often get "cited" in these slop stories. Here's one that just popped up about the Rad bankruptcy. Nearly all the figures in the piece are just plain wrong, but then the AI attributes the errors to us! Fuck this.

From outside this may sound like an elitist "you poor baby you deprived yourself of knowledge" But no, it's a legit problem. You went straight from point A to point M, but the interstitial steps are SO important! All of those give you information and context. They make you better in the future.

Douglas Adams: I created a satirical thing called Genuine People Personalities for the robots in books, so a door can tell you how happy it is to open for you Amazon: We have implemented Genuine People Personalities, so a door can tell you how happy it is to open for you

Living in Oxford for five years, a city at the confluence of several rivers, I never encountered floodwater as regularly as I have in one month in Didcot. Obviously the rain has been quite prolonged today but this crossing gets inundated after only a few hours of modest rain.

Tell you what, I'm glad there wasn't a sequel and am glad that the proposed TV series seems stuck in development hell. Not everything should be franchised, it's alright for some things to exist as a singular, perfect pearl. gizmodo.com/sigourney-we...

Hang up your salopettes because ‘Freak heat’ = new normal. Incredible scenes that the Times has managed to report on this without mentioning climate change at all

Techbros seem to love Tolkien, so here's an analogy to help you understand what genAI is. GenAI is The One Ring. You think your use is justified, b/c you don't have evil in your heart. But it came from evil, it is intended for evil purpose, & anything you do with it will be twisted to that end.

New research finds that car touchscreens are so distracting that they induce "significant performance degradation" among drivers. Meanwhile, in-vehicle touchscreens remain completely unregulated in the US. doi.org/10.1145/3746...

he also kind of gets everyone's asses again in this follow up with the washington post

Man answering his phone on the train: Yes? Correct, I’m not at work (pause) I’m not going to answer that because I am not at work today. No, you’re going to have to ask someone who is. Goodbye.

Businesses in the city centre complaining about reduced footfall due to the congestion charge despite empirical data showing the opposite and so the cosmic ballet goes on www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/transport-an...

The Spotify Wrapped contagion is getting very silly, I've just got a year in review from Google Drive.

You might think that a man who drove into 100 people, using his car as a weapon, would NEVER be allowed to drive again. It turns out he will be able to, around three years after leaving prison by taking an extended retest. Why should he ever be able to get behind the wheel again?

Imagine if cities demanded the same of car manufacturers.

Paul Doyle is a shitty guy who did a horrific thing. But he's also the extreme end of a spectrum of behaviour that normalises violence as a response to inconvenience when behind the wheel.

Just a reminder that at least 600 Americans were fired for failing to show sufficient respect after Charlie Kirk's murder.

Tuned into the company all hands from my couch under a blanket and a cat and this combined with their strange decision to have an extremely uninteresting conversation about Formula 1 for 20 minutes meant that I literally dozed off. Firmly entering my old man era.

Every time I see an example of "conservatives making stuff up to be mad about" my mind always goes back to what I think of as the most distilled specimen of this: