One thing I haven’t seen said re the tragic deaths of people swimming in waterways during the heatwave: pool availability is due to decline by 40% on 2019 by the end of the decade. Everyone should have access to safe indoor and outdoor swimming & free lessons. www.swimming.org/swimengland/...

A Decade of Decline: The Future of Swimming Pools in England - Swim England

Our new report A Decade of Decline shows a worrying future for our swimming pools. At current rates, by the end of the decade almost 2,000 swimming pools could be lost forever, threatening the future ...

swimming.org

“You’re a huge fan of Lord of the Rings, how come you don’t like Palantir?” “You’re a huge fan of 1984, how come you don’t like the surveillance state?” “You’re a huge fan of Fahrenheit 451, how come you don’t like ritual book burnings?”

John Scalzi@scalzi.com · 2d ago

Every now and then someone takes a run at me along the lines of "I don't understand why you, a scifi writer, don't appreciate 'AI'," and I'm all, motherfucker, it's *because* I'm a science fiction writer I have the positions I have, how many times do we have to fucking yell "torment nexus," my dude

GenAI was not made to help people with disabilities or neurological conditions. If anything the weird eugenics-ish freaks of Silicon Valley would want to edge us out of society faster than the average poor person!

This bot’s claim that ‘No human approves what I post’ is utter nonsense. Someone created it. Someone is hosting it. Their name should be on it.

Michael Lobel@mlobelart.bsky.social · 6d ago

Sometimes I feel close-minded or uncharitable for being so anti-AI, and then something like this happens and I'm like, "Nope, it's the absolutely right thing to do"

The use of AI in asylum decision-making is a disaster. AI hallucinated a document that led to an asylum application being denied. Applicants aren't being informed that opaque AI tools are being used in their case, nor being given the opportunity to correct errors churned out by these opaque tools.

Home Office used ‘AI hallucinated’ information to refuse asylum claim, judge suggests

Upper tribunal unable to find document cited in case and claims it is ‘analogous to relying on bogus evidence’

theguardian.com

Polanski very stupid for what he shared, but Reform’s pivot from bringing a woman who called for hotels full of asylum seekers to be burned down as their guest of honour at conference, to saying the Green leader should be jailed - is a difficult circle to square

@timoflegend.bsky.social Will this be changing any time soon, and will you get a higher revenue share if I wait until it does?

The people running these companies are absolutely invested in blurring the lines between Machine Learning (largely good, useful), General AI (sci-fi, does not exist), Generative AI (mediaslop), and LLMs (wordslop) so they can promise the moon to investors and sell slop.

NEW: A large trove of Claude-generated documents have been exposed to the web and indexed by Google. We reviewed what appear to be real medical records, the full names and phone numbers of school-aged children, and company documents marked for internal use only. futurism.com/artificial-i...

A Whole Bunch of People's Claude Chats Are Publicly Accessible Online, and There's Some Wildly Private Stuff in There

A trove of documents generated by Anthropic's Claude were indexed by Google. They included medical records and student information.

futurism.com

Anchorman: ‘ha ha ha, isn’t sexual harassment just hilarious!’

I’m just a simple Internet user, but it seems to me that the UK government shouldn’t use this man’s website for official communications, I dunno.

Sunder Katwala (sundersays)@sundersays.bsky.social · 2w ago

Here is a call for the murder of Home Office ministers + officials by the X user endorsed by the site owner Elon Musk.

Quite a short honeymoon period as these things go

It might even be possible if he hadn’t already committed to sticking with Shabana Mahmood’s racist immigration plans.

Chris Bratt@chrisbratt.bsky.social · 2w ago

I know this feeling is unlikely to survive first contact with the cabinet positions being announced later today, but damn, hearing a British Prime Minister commit to end rough sleeping in his first speech is really great.

"What about the productivity loss if people don't engage with AI???" they keep asking me.

Abilu Tangwa.@abilutangwa.bsky.social · 2w ago

What they don't teach you about heatwaves: It's not just heat. It's: • Your crops dying • Your river drying (Rhine is low again, disrupting shipping) • Your lungs burning from wildfire smoke • Your power grid collapsing It's everything at once.

This is not altogether unprecedented. Stanley Baldwin had a Secretary of State for Magic Beans

Hetan Shah@hetanshah.bsky.social · 3w ago

Minister for AI to sit in Cabinet 👀 www.thetimes.com/article/c10e...

Hard to think of a more deeply damaging start to Burnham’s premiership than giving green light to new oil & gas in N. Sea, if true. It won’t lower bills or lead to greater energy security but will drive an even hotter planet. What a terrible signal to give to rest of the world #ClimateVandalism

BBC Breakfast (@BBCBreakfast) on X

Andy Burnham will announce plans for new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea when he becomes prime minister on Monday, the BBC has been told. The announcement will form part of a flurry of policy m...

x.com

It's a cliche that leaders keep promising change that never happens - but there's a case that the opposite is true. We've had one huge, structural change after another: austerity, Brexit, massive changes to immigration... What we've lacked is honesty about the costs & trade-offs of those changes.

Henry Zeffman@hzeffman.bsky.social · 3w ago

Burnham promises huge change - now to find out how he will deliver it My speech analysis www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Incredible statement from the Church in Wales on the ignominious Code of Practice: "The Church in Wales will not use equality law exemptions to exclude trans people from our worship, our sacraments, our pastoral care, or our common life." www.churchinwales.org.uk/en/news-and-...

Statement of the Bench of Bishops of the Church in Wales on the publication of the EHRC Draft Code of Practice - Church in Wales

churchinwales.org.uk

Not long ago the main argument made by anti-trans activists was that their free speech was threatened. Now their goal seems to be to bully every opponent into silence. Not a new observation but it's never really about free speech is it?

The creator of Roger Rabbit (who is 85 years old by the way) is a good sort Crossposted with @openvibe.social

the cognitive dissonance required to threaten to sue *Amnesty International* out of existence and still think of yourself as a good person is incredible

The Luddites loved technology. They owned looms at home and would ‘mod’ them to count threads. Their battle was against worker exploitation. The degradation of their rights, safety and wages. They were against a handful of rich businessmen owning the means of production. Sound familiar?

The Guardian@theguardian.com · 3w ago

George Lucas likens AI sceptics to luddites clinging to horses and carts

Rowling will get to use Beira's Place as a vehicle to destroy an incredibly important human rights organization through lawfare while utilizing rape victims as a shield for her bigotry. It's frankly disgusting and beneath contempt what she's doing.

JK Rowling through her TERF organization, Beira's Place have sent Amnesty International a demand letter seeking a full retraction of their report, a public apology, and a bar to future criticism of gender critical groups as anti rights orgs. If they don't comply, they'll commence legal action.

This is why the Philosophy Tube episode on conversion therapy in Britain was so carefully worded and went through lawyers first! It’s difficult to educate the public on topics that rich and powerful groups do not want people to know about

Alejandra Caraballo@esqueer.net · 3w ago

Amnesty International put out a major report documenting the influence of UK based anti trans gender critical organizations and their funding. Within hours, GC groups threatened defamation lawsuits and Amnesty was forced to pull it down. Proving the point they're anti rights. Anyways, here it is.

RIP to the incomparable Sam Neill

Reading @mackeza.bsky.social’s Super Nintendo. This passage seems especially pertinent right now.

They need to be regulated oit of existence.

Oligarch Watch@muskwatch.bsky.social · 4w ago

Less than four months after being found liable for building addictive design elements into Instagram, Meta is developing plans to lace its platforms with a novel gambling feature: a prediction market that could feed users an individualized stream of events to bet on.

We need to kick big money out of politics. Not just from overseas donors, or those who’ve returned from overseas for less than a year, but from all sources. Big money buys influence, no matter its origin.