We shouldn't fall for the myth that channelling money to the private sector is the ONLY way to build infrastructure. Investing public money directly would give the public 100% ownership over anything we build, avoiding profiteering by private companies. neweconomics.org/2026/04/the-...

The private finance myth

Towards a better balance of public and private infrastructure provision

neweconomics.org

Met a friend for a drink tonight with their partner who is famous enough to be recognised in any given pub and let me tell you that shit sucks, you should not want that, my absolute condolences to anyone whose job means strangers ruin their social lives. What an absolute drag.

just got an app on my motorola razr that does the Howie Scream when ever my fingers or my toes or my penis is bitten by dogs

It is a moral failure to treat the swift removal of immigrants as a victory. It is also a gift to the far right… Only a few voices on the European left have placed focus where it belongs: with supporting immigrants who remain on Ceuta. @theintercept.com theintercept.com/2026/08/03/c...

Liberals Are Ceding Ground to the Far Right on Ceuta Border Crossings

From the New York Times to the EU, liberals defending Spain from far-right fearmongering are regurgitating the right’s anti-immigrant premise.

theintercept.com

In the process of planning my first in-studio recording session since March 2020 and the excitement is pretty overwhelming. Of course I'm hoping we don't call this one off halfway through in order to go into full lockdown, but...

No longer content with pillaging intellectual work and dismembering our environment (already critically weakened), AI companies are now hellbent on destroying books galore including rare editions. Shut down these nefarious enterprises already.

AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books

If you have retreated to physical books because the internet is too full of AI slop, bad news — now they’re shredding the books to feed their AI slop machines.

news.com.au

Show me your ASSES

Jessica Smith@thedaybooks.bsky.social · last wk.

It’s nice to see everyone’s textual analysis of The Odyssey It’s almost like the humanities give you entertainment, feelings, pleasure, and fun/interesting stuff to talk about, as well as lenses into both past and current society

It is basically impossible to have an opinion in public without showing your ass, but also isn't "looking at and talking about each other's asses" the entire business of being human?

150,000 marched yesterday in London for trans rights. Opened the Sky News app. Scrolled and scrolled. Nothing. BBC News app. Nothing. Guardian app. Nothing. This is what actual silencing looks like.

"The questions for someone who uses generative AI become simple. How dare you? Why should anyone trust you have ever made anything worth believing in? Was it all worth it?" www.anxietyshark.ca/an-empty-bit...

An empty bit of good.

Let the machine work and drain and sputter and purge, may we dance and clap at what meagre pleasures it can conjure.

anxietyshark.ca

Gonna spend the day tomorrow with my dad and son... Get a little coffee... Eat a cake... Slide a slide... Just so thankful

Sorry everyone I thought about touching cotton wool so my brain is inoperable for the next 17 business days

Poinpy transported me back to 2011, commuting across London playing games on my newly-acquired-with-my-first-paycheck iPhone 3. It will remind you of the promise of mobile games before the casino took hold. The clarity and physicality of the animations will make you think about Persona UI. GAME GOOD

Ojiro Fumoto@moppin.bsky.social · 2w ago

POINPY IS BACK! 🎉 And now it's FREE! No ads, no paid unlocks, just the full game. There's a tip option if you feel like it 😉 Available NOW on iOS and Android!

if you think something being "natural" or "plant-based" makes it healthy and something being made in a lab and loaded into a syringe is inherently dangerous, you're an idiot. you should lose access to your kids if you harm them due to this belief www.propublica.org/article/more...

Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth

A lifesaving injection given at birth to prevent severe bleeding has become collateral damage of the anti-vaccine movement.

propublica.org

You don’t have the right to choke your kid regardless of your beliefs. You shouldn’t have the right to prevent life-saving medical interventions, especially when they’re so young and vulnerable and the interventions are extremely time-sensitive

Jimothy and the surrounding fervour is a nice reminder that having a monoculture wasn't always particularly good. Being silo'd has significant downsides but at least it stops me having to know about your moustache finger tattoo bullshit.

insane how there isn’t a single industry where being good at your job does anything for you variety.com/2026/film/ne...

Pixar Bears Brunt of Disney Studio Layoffs as Company Axes Several Hundred Staffers

Pixar Animation Studios, despite riding high on the success of summer blockbuster "Toy Story 5," was hit particularly hard in a wave of corporatewide layoffs at Disney.

variety.com

the concept of migration control is incredibly historically new and when it is abolished - and it will be abolished, like all unjust laws are - we will look back on it as if it was a complete insanity. what lunatic would say that your life should be restricted to a territory you were born in

As an absolute BARE MINIMUM Burnham needs to do the following; These are litmus tests; they will show if he really means it when he says “hope”. It will show whether or not he is going to stand up for ordinary people. It will show whether he is brave enough to stand up to the media barons.

The main way in which AI has negatively impacted games industry jobs is not through actual automation of those jobs or even untrue claims about automation. It's by making capital unavailable because it's tied up in AI investments while also destroying the consumer base for video game hardware.

yes! as someone who’s been working in procedural text before LLMs were a thing, I really wish people had a sense of the varieties of procgen writing that *aren’t* genAI output. there’s a ton of stuff we can do (including pre-LLM, ML style AI) that’s nothing like chatbot output directly in a game.

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 2w ago

Thank you! Very illuminating. We’re so fixated on genAI right now, it’s useful to be reminded of the varieties of synthetic and procedural text flowing through different kinds of experiences.

This is fucking terrifying

Aurelien Mondon@aurelmondon.com · 2w ago

"Cognitive surrender" is a fascinating concept to think about the impact of AI as it exists under reactionary tech Preventing people from thinking for themselves and imagining different worlds is a godsend for authoritarians thenextweb.com/news/wharton...

They should let you smoke a cigarette of the feeling of "your kid just finally fell the fuck to sleep"

Surely this is a national emergency when we're having this many wildfires, this often

EdinburghMinute.com@edinburghminute.com · 2w ago

1am update: Photo of the fire on the Crags in Edinburgh by Minute subscriber Adam Johnston.

A lot of people don’t realize the dust bowl wasn’t a natural phenomenon. It happened when agrobusiness interests dramatically transformed the plains without regard for drought, and created vicious dust storms that choked whole families to death. That’s what I think of when I read about data centers.

When I was a kid I got the impression that the education I was lucky enough to be given would improve my chances at living a happier life, but really it just gave me a greater vulnerability to psychic damage

The wildfires in Ontario have turned the air poison. These AQI values are a risk to everyone, not just the “vulnerable” The eugenicist mindset of leaving high risk people by the wayside is why we don’t have clean indoor air or better mitigations Disability justice saves lives

The "maybe this time" to "fell for it again" timeline in British Politics is now so short we're whiffing on the football and falling on our arses before Lucy has even set it down on the ground. He's not even Prime Minister for two more days.

As the laundering of Starmer’s PM-ship is starting, this is what I see as his legacy. Not just a failure to stand up to racism and ethno-nationalism but active pandering, hoping for increased vote share. Zero principles, zero values, zero spine. No 195-point list will make this stain go away.

Londoners share racist abuse stories amid hate crime report rise

With racist hate crimes on the increase, young Londoners speak out about the abuse they have faced.

bbc.com

If a team makes a game that gets great reviews and doesn't sell, that's a biz failing but the silver lining is you caught lighting in a bottle -- protect that team! It's worth its weight in gold. If you jettison the team but keep the biz people, I don't know what to tell you