well well well, not so easy to replicate the most successful collaborative information effort in human history with a stack of GPUs and a pile of logits, is it?

Lawfare@lawfaremedia.org · 8h ago

Grokipedia appears not to have updated any articles since April 24. @noupside.bsky.social and @rer.bsky.social explore why it matters that the encyclopedia hasn’t edited itself or processed edits from humans in more than 3 months. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/grok...

just had a horrific vision of the future in which Zack Polanski and Kemi Badenoch have a podcast and now I need a lie down

damp shrug of cow horn “we’re hairy for a reason” – summer in Scotland —a haar coo

James Oswald@sirbenfro.bsky.social · yesterday

Lonesome coo

"Today is August 4, 2026" There Will Come Soft Rains By: Ray Bradbury

Yes I acknowledge it makes sense in context but “I need my car to meet criminals” is now my favourite basis for an attempted exceptional hardship plea. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Foucault: "schools serve the same societal function as prisons and mental institutions." Foucault's Mum: "you're still going."

Sam Freedman@samfr.bsky.social · 3d ago

It's made me think more about the non-academic purposes of schools...

The question is no longer whether LLMs can lead to disordered behavior. It's how we (and you) choose to think and talk about people exhibiting that behavior, and also how we choose to handle the companies and people profiting off dangerous and antisocial actions bsky.app/profile/look...

Ian Coldwater 🧊🚫@lookitup.baby · 4d ago

I feel like takes scoffing at the idea that people could have addictive behavior patterns relating to LLMs are likely to age poorly

Well, this is worrying for those of us in the velum printing trade. Let’s hope the government step in. Time to nationalise goats?

The Heraldry Society@theheraldrysociety.bsky.social · 5d ago

A notice from The Heraldry Society concerning William Cowley the UK's last commercial parchment and vellum maker.

good to know that we have finally established a threshold for "exactly how much corruption is too much in international football" www.bbc.co.uk/sport/footba...

Fifa World Cup plans: Gianni Infantino scraps private investment proposal after widespread opposition

Football's world governing body Fifa abandons plans to sell off stakes in its major competitions after widespread opposition to president Gianni Infantino's proposal.

bbc.co.uk

I work at a public library. People who want to use AI seem to have no trouble doing so. People who don't want to use AI have a harder time. I crowdsourced and then finalized this document "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI" and then gave it a short URL: notoai.org Please pass along if it's useful

The Odyssey merch is getting out of hand

Unofficial BBCNews (UK) Bot@bbcnews-uk-rss.bsky.social · 6d ago

Sainsbury's to sell Argos for £120m

Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester behind the scenes of “The Bride of Frankenstein” 1935

People talking about 1976: "we weren't dramatic like these days, we just got on with it" Also, 1976: "we have appointed a Minister for Drought and are forcing him to dance for rain"

Neon Genesis Ewangelion@ewacat.bsky.social · last wk.

oh my god

1927: Herbert jokes about a court being called upon to decide what successor of a political party should get an inheritance 2026: news.bloomberglaw.com/employee-ben...

Just had the best interaction with a political organization I'm probably going to have all year

"when did you stop beating your wife" is a trick question to which there is famously no good answer. conversely, "do you beat your wife" is a straightforward question to which there ... kind of obviously is a good answer? shootingthemessenger.blog/2026/07/30/s...

English: entirely a trap. French: numbers. a trap. Polish: four letters: Łódź. a trap. Finnish: vowels so smooth you slip over them. a trap. German: words connected like train carriages. a trap. etc

Neon Genesis Ewangelion@ewacat.bsky.social · 7d ago

i love it when a Polish word or name with ł is around because it is a trap. i respect languages with traps

Today's odd historical footnote: in 1931 someone bought the rights to salvage the Lusitania and proposed doing so by ... building a ladder down to it. You'd climb down a 200' tube at atmospheric pressure then enter a diving airlock. They got as far as building the tube.

This is just to say I have OCRed the text thet was in tne arch:ve and whicb yov were prabaldy seamhing for "breahtast" Fargme ms fheg mem debo:w5 sb ?mccf mmb 5c oc1b

congratulations to the UX designers at the British Newspaper Archive, who have taken a site that basically worked, and done their best to fix that problem. Look at this sidebar: in the old design it would be sorted by frequency and I could tell at a glance what the shape of the hits were. Now, no.

Is this a good time to mention that in college my History of Translation lecturer (Michael Cronin) told us that one of the first vernacular translations of The Illiad was into Irish, and the translator had to give the main characters dogs because in Gaelic society a free man had a dog

It's never been cheaper to run for parliament.

Tim Bale@timbale.bsky.social · last wk.

JICYMI #Clacton by-election ballot paper

A comment on the “infinite monkey theorem” (monkeys typing Shakespeare, eventually)—only it’s the 19th C astronomy writer Garrett P. Serviss relating Kepler’s account of the improbability of a random well-dressed salad. I love this story and Kepler’s wife’s wit. #histsci 🧪🔭

Okay one more odyssey post. Really loved the movie. But I for one am willing to stop rescuing Matt Damon. At some point we’re just going to have to collectively agree that if Matt Damon gets lost again we just have to let him go.

Monday: use the fancy new automatic key cutting machine at B&Q Sunday: remember to test new keys, front door lock immediately breaks irreparably Either this is an unfortunate coincidence, or they've finally managed to bring hardware into line with software quality standards.

Evacuation of the sixth biggest population centre in France under active consideration and some will still say "it's just Summer"

Andy Scollick@andyscollick.bsky.social · 2w ago

Firefighters 'overwhelmed' and 'concerned about the city of Bordeaux' (Sky News)

It is three years since everyone* got briefly obsessed with (nonexistent) room temperature semiconductors. Remember that? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99 * everyone = vocal techbros

LK-99 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Government: the licenses are awarded, we can't possibly delay North Sea drilling The industry: hold my - oh, wait, no. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

New North Sea oil drilling faces delay after gear accidentally dropped in sea

Exclusive: Blunder at Rosebank, UK’s biggest undeveloped oilfield, comes as government considers granting licence

theguardian.com

No matter how embarrassing you think this is going to be, it's worse than that

Robert Komaniecki@komaniecki.bsky.social · 2w ago

This utter muppet of a conservative Canadian politician in New Brunswick forgot to remove the LLM text from his floor speech and read it out loud.

I’ve been standing stock still in this wood for about 10 minutes while I mess about with a photo on my phone. I look up, notice the shape, and slowly crouch down to film This has made me so happy I feel I could cry. It’s as close to magic as I hope to get.