How, possibly, is it yet again time to make dinner.

Just going to say, no thank you www.theguardian.com/world/2026/o...

Hackers force French supermarket fridges to heat up to 50C in ‘unprecedented’ cyber-attack

Hundreds of Intermarché shops and Coopérative U outlets in France hit, with fears Dutch chains also affected

theguardian.com

This is very interesting because it's sthg the Start-Up Coalition (quoted here) have been pushing for for some time, and has presumably been dangled as sthg that will help expedite AI "sovereignty"

Financial Times@financialtimes.com · 18h ago

City of London hits out at Burnham’s plan to scrap non-compete clauses ft.trib.al/NEWjJBt

I don't think the pollsters really understand that people spend about 70% of their brains on various kinds of fiction, and questions like this are obviously about fictional worlds not the boringly factual one. What they have actually asked is 'do you like the idea that maybe werewolves exist?'.

I firmly believe a sort of choice blindness overtakes people when they're asked YouGov multiple choice questions. Acc to this, 47% people think witches with magic powers either do or could possibly exist and that does seem *quite high*

Huw C. Davies@huwcdavies.bsky.social · 2d ago

Find this sort of thing fascinating because if any of these things did exist it would violate all natural laws, The Standard Model, and everything we know scientifically about the nature of reality.

This popped up on my feed just after I'd been talking with someone about genAI in fanfic and this is like an extract from the world's most bleak and miserable fic

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 2d ago

There are a lot of details in here about Zuck releasing a half-baked product, but one thing that really stands out is just how weird these folks are. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/t...

Considering making this a sticker to add to the FOMO pack carefulindustries.teemill.com/product/stic...

Sticker pack

A Just enough Internet sticker and a FOMO is not a strategy sticker. Pop them on your laptop and show everyone what a sensible pragmatist you are.

carefulindustries.teemill.com

Rachel Coldicutt@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 4d ago

I do, honestly, want to like more things, they just need to be better.

2024: every bug bounty program shuts down because of a flood of bogus AI generated bug reports 2025: open source repos begin closing submissions because of AI generated PRs 2026: Anthropic begins trialing AI generated police tip line calls

Ignacio GHOULlup-Diaz@igallupd.bsky.social · 3d ago

"Anthropic’s artificial intelligence gave a false homicide tip to Philly police, triggering a meeting with the company: The incident happened on July 18 but was not discovered by the Silicon Valley company until September, authorities say."

How exactly do cats know that the best time for them to stop eating a certain kind of cat food is the day after you've bought an enormous job lot? How do they do it?

I just noticed that the website for the UK Gov Sovereign AI Fund looks a bit like it's promoting either a video game or a new Star Wars movie www.sovereignai.gov.uk

UK Sovereign AI Fund | Backing British AI Startups

Britain's sovereign venture fund investing £1M-£20M in AI startups. Get capital, compute (1M GPU hours), fast-track visas, and strategic assets.

sovereignai.gov.uk

Isn't it the case that the best local candidate won in Holborn and St Pancras, despite several high-profile men trying to make it All About Them, which is great for local residents? www.standard.co.uk/news/politic...

Who is Sagal Abdi-Wali? New London MP who escaped civil war in Somalia as a child

Who is Sagal Abdi-Wali? Leader of Camden Council comfortably wins north London by-election

standard.co.uk

Absolutely classic that, only 17 years too late, the BBC decides to copy Netflix with the incredibly sexy "iPlayer and chill" offer, in case anyone wants to have sexy time while watching Country File.

Film Stories@filmstories.bsky.social · 5d ago

The BBC's director general Matt Brittin outlines a Netflix-style vision for iPlayer, including an AI agent called Iggy that speaks to users. filmstories.co.uk/news/bbc-exp...

I mean I am officially not a marrier, but I could be persuaded for this.

Jo Kibble (Political Animal)@politicanimal.bsky.social · 4d ago

Imagine not wanting to incorporate a council by-election count into your wedding reception. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, before their first dance, the bride and groom will now announce the number of valid ballot papers issued.’

this might seem like a completely wild and out there opinion, but I feel like a big 4 accounting firm is not where you want to be going for your "AI and civil society" strategy

Quite a lot of the nuance of navigating being over 50 is working out whether I'm having an existential crisis or if I just really need to go to the opticians.

The mercilessly unfair thing about having broken the coffee grinder is that I have to work out how to mend it before I have drunk any coffee.

Person next to me on the train this morning was scrabbling for wifi (aren't we all) and I couldn't help notice they mostly watched a video of a sad Weimaraner sitting next to a birthday cake. I def cannot criticise this while also reflecting we may have got this knowledge infra thing a bit wrong.

Excellent thread that it's worth reading up and down - of particular relevance to my research at the moment as it seems clear that designing to evals and testing through assurance has inherent limits when the actual thing being and the way it's made is fundamentally problematic.

Pwnallthethings@pwnallthethings.bsky.social · 6d ago

First, I think it's wrong to think of frontier labs as entirely a monolith. There's a few competing interests that need to be disentangled. But the top-level reason is that math capability is an obvious measure of model intelligence as a whole. So there is an incentive for labs to focus on it

I missed the Lab Conf this year so didn't get to hear the mood music on AI, and while I appreciate that Narayan has a difficult job, the assertion that" Technology as an industry has not engaged sufficiently with politics and the British public" is simply not true.

Zoë Crowther@zoecrowther.bsky.social · last wk.

Read the full interview here 👇 9/9

It takes us several days to watch an episode of Bake Off as a family, and it is so completely delicious. Not only is it the perfect antidote to the ways gen AI is leaching creativity but @nigella.bsky.social and Alison Hammond are just perfect - wise and compassionate and funny and sparkly.

Just back from a very pleasant day spent wandering around Brighton, which I suspect might now be the iced matcha latte capital of the UK. In the centre of town and by the sea front, my guess is that you are never more than 25m away from a matcha whisk.

I see some discussion here about the days of stochastic parrots being over, and I think there is an in-ter-est-ing thing to note that *one's own* conversations a chatbot can seem quite plausible and useful but the minute someone else sends you some AI-generated text, it is clearly no good at all

Doing a quick in-and-out at the Green Party Conf this evening to talk about data centres and sustainable tech. My only party conference this year and my first Green Party one, which is all quite novel. Anyway, the tl;dr is hyperscale is a choice not the default.

I suspect the problem here is a strategic one not a technology one, and that (bear with me) Burnham doesn't want to *replace* Palantir but find a different way to solve the same problems giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Andy Burnham searches for UK alternative to Palantir

Prime minister’s ‘Buy British’ push triggers hunt to find replacement for controversial US tech group awarded health service and defence contracts

giftarticle.ft.com

From today's incomprehensible AI-generated emails about AI. Also, AI developers are really trying to make the word "context" happen.

Currently in an interminable cycle of clearing out and mildly surprised to note that we seem to have lovingly kept every single pair of 3D glasses we have picked up from the cinema over the last decade or so. No idea why we have so many or what I thought we would do with them.

On the phone, as part of an actual call, how many times, and in how many different ways, do you say "goodbye"? I just managed a "see you soon". "bye bye" (?), "bye" to someone coming to replace our electricity meter. Not, say, a member of my actual family.

Who's doing work on what's happening in the online payments space at the moment? Not just Klarna/rise of pay in 3, but the (afaict?) decline of paypal as the market diversifies? Am particularly interested to know if there's a conscious Mastercard/Visa strategy to keep card payments in contention

Plus, the "White House Accord on Super Intelligence: Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities" signed by Trump, Google's Pichai, Anthropic's Amodei, Meta's Zuckerberg, OpenAI's Brockman, XAI's Musk, Nvida's Huang.

Was just looking for restaurant ideas in a particular areas of London and was treated to these "other people asked" gems in Google search results. We're going to have to back to using the Yellow Pages soon.