Bluesky is for people who made Twitter a loadbearing part of their personality in their twenties. This is why the joke is that everyone on here is 38 years old.
This is a lovely site which helps remind us of much of what we take for granted in material progress ordinaryabundance.com (HT @aveek18.bsky.social)
Ordinary Abundance
A walk through a modern apartment, through the eyes of the people for whom everything in it was new.
ordinaryabundance.com
A contrast: - Bsky is a charity funded by rich techbros and VCs - Bsky is the most techbro- and VC-hostile major social network and proud of it There are probably lessons here somewhere
Anthropic is really pushing the boundaries* *of what "ownership" means
One consequence of HS2 NIMBYs getting their deep cuts and tunnels is that internet on those trains will be a massive challenge Tens of millions of passengers every year having no internet just because a few dozen rural voters don't want to see trains
More than half of accounts posting about violence in Belfast & Southampton on X were based overseas. Only 4 of the 12 most-seen posts were from the UK. X is now "“a weapon of choice” for hostile foreign actors seeking to manipulate shocking & divisive content". www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...
New post out: "The myth of the 'Boriswave'" The online right claim that the immigrants who arrived between 21-24 will bankrupt the country. This isn't remotely true but they've created a mainstream panic that could lead us down a dangerous path. (£/free trial) samf.substack.com/p/the-myth-o...
The myth of the "Boriswave"
Over summer 2024 anonymous right-wing accounts on twitter, who support Reform or more extreme ethnonationalist parties, started using the term “Boriswave” to describe the brief but sharp rise in net m...
samf.substack.com
Possibly the most exclusive club in Britain: companies that are 300+ years old & still family-owned. The Tercentenarians. They have survived Napoleon, the Industrial Revolution, 2 world wars, 17 recessions and the dot com boom. What's their secret? I visited & spoke to some to find out.... 🧵1/7
That Extract thing sounds exactly like the kind of AI tool I'd like to see: empowerment not substitution
James O'Malley@jamesomalley.co.uk · 2mo agoHere's how the government is using AI to speed up the planning system (FREE TO READ!) takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/build-gemi...
One like one random DOE/NNSA story 🤷♂️⚛️
Mike Black@mikeblack114.bsky.social · 2w agoOne like one random AF story
Ada Palmer cares and had trans and non-binary beta-readers to make sure she wouldn't inadvertently offend. But in Perhaps the Stars it's still Kiev not Kyiv The set of people, atrocities, and imperialist projects we care about is always socially conditioned even when we try
Striking how clearly Terence Tao's presentation on AI in mathematics mirrors the situation in software engineering teorth.github.io/tao-web/slid... Many influential voices mistake the first two parts for the entirety of software engineering. But "vibe coding" = "unverified solutions"
I love this AI policy, absolutely genius
eliza🌻@elizas.website · last wk.with times being what they are, it seems like you basically can't have a public open source repo without receiving LLM-written PRs. thus, after a great deal of thought, i have adopted the somewhat idiosyncratic Mycelium AI Policy in my personal projects: github.com/hawkw/myceli...
I run a food business, where I'm training a number of people who have never used the metric system before to measure things in grams and kilos, and I'm always utterly befuddled when they have trouble with it. (1/)
Mike Black@mikeblack114.bsky.social · last wk."I fully understand the level of distinction between $50,000 and $500,000, but, to me, one million and one trillion dollars are basically the same thing unless I really think hard about it, and even then" describes a good 75% of the US population
Wilson on the left, Green on the right > Odysseus sat patiently and prayed. vs > So while Odysseus prayed there, godlike and much-enduring, > Her brothers gathered round her like immortals. vs > Her brothers, men like immortals, came out, crowded round her, Why do people rate the one on the left?
@adapalmer.bsky.social any chance for a correction in future reprints 🙏 ("Kiev" is Russian, Kyiv is Ukrainian)
One more reason to like Fastmail
Fastmail@fastmail.com · 2w agoFastmail data can now live primarily in the EU, on servers our own engineers set up in Amsterdam. Current customers can switch in settings; new accounts pick a region at signup. Our CEO Bron's post walks through exactly what lives where. www.fastmail.com/blog/fastmai... #Fastmail #Email
I feel vindicated in my ongoing bewilderment at the pedestal people put Emily Wilson on The essay is shallow, overly wordy, sometimes wrong, but most inexcusably very mean
Amrk@amrk.bsky.social · 3w agoThis is… really really weird? “Nyong’o… perform[s]… the repentant adulteress” no she doesn’t The sirens are “naked ladies” - they’re on screen for maybe half a second, in silhouette Every non white person in the cast “play versions of the Black best friend” 🥶 www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
There is also the fact that this lad turned up to the Green party's big fundraising rave on Sunday wearing a explicit call for the murder of a political opponent... ... and not only did no one see the issue, they chose to photo him and use his image to promote it. The issues go further than Zack
Jordan@jordanpfot.bsky.social · 3w agoThe least you can do is check the images on Instagram post you’re accepting a collaboration request from. He’s not cut out for the big leagues. Sorry!
The number of people going on about greedy capitalists and degrowth in replies when even the embedded photo has a logo of a commercial, for-profit company behind the project polarnightenergy.com/investors/
Investors
Polar Night Energy is owned by its founders along with a diverse group of investment companies and private investors. We are currently focusing on team expansion, scaling our sales operations…
polarnightenergy.com
Jan Rosenow@janrosenow.bsky.social · 3w agoPornainen, Finland (pop 5,000) is now heated by a silo of crushed soapstone. I spoke to CNBC about it. 100 MWh, charged when power is cheap, emissions down ~70%. Days to weeks of storage, no critical minerals. www.cnbc.com/2026/07/25/f...
This is a really good short primer on the social care issue www.ft.com/content/c314...
Why is England unable to fix social care?
The failure of successive governments to confront the problem carries a heavy political cost
ft.com
By popular* demand I have added my many words to all the other bits and pieces reflecting on the end of DSIT. *@semanthicc.bsky.social and one other said they were waiting to hear my take.
GDS, AI and the missing theory of the digital state
Two years after digital, data and AI were brought together, the settlement is being dismantled. What does that tell us about the state Britain is trying to build?
bm.wel.by
Elon Musk, owner of X, has called the editor of the Economist "a traitor to the West, plain and simple" after her recent interview with him. He now argues that "anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor" Musk has been socialising violence since Aug25: "fight or die, that's what it comes down to"
What would all-out atomic war between the US and the USSR have looked at in the early days of the Cold War, just before the Korean War? For DOOMSDAY MACHINES this week I dive into the details of war plan OFFTACKLE (1950). doomsdaymachines.net/p/how-to-fig...
How to fight a nuclear war in 1950
OFFTACKLE, the first US war plan after the loss of the nuclear monopoly
doomsdaymachines.net
Seen that opinion poll in which millionaires say they're in favour of a wealth tax on millionaires? It's an absolute masterclass in how to get the polling result that you want. And the detail shows the opposite of what we're told it shows. Thread:
It's ridiculous how this is a controversial statement even though it's entirely factual
Dan Groshev@dangroshev.com · 3w agoFor all intents and purposes, this is the cost of not installing enough aircon
