@jamesneill.bsky.social
Hi, I'm being made redundant by the University of Southampton at the end of this month. I'm desperately looking for work. I'll consider all offers but have particular skills in policy, strategy and research. I also have a consultancy service I offer. Please let me know if you hear of anything
Bay Area friends: would you consider opening your home to these two cuddly cats? A friend found them behind a gas station. Their sibling, a black cat, got adopted, but it appears no one likes orange cats. They are being kept in a bathroom for the time being and need a home.
derek guy@dieworkwear.bsky.social · 4w agoA friend of mine found these three kittens behind a Bay Area gas station. They are tame, vaccinated, and incredibly affectionate. Unfortunately, she's unable to keep them and I'm trying to find them a home. They are at risk of going to a shelter. Bay Area people, are you open to adopting?
EU membership is the best way to grow the UK economy. 🔊 'Mr Burnham cannot present himself as a "step forward" while sliding backwards on Europe. To fund social care without raising taxes or borrowing, he urgently needs economic growth.'
Letter: It's time Andy Burnham broke his silence on Brexit
SIR - If a week is a long time in politics, two weeks is an eternity. Yet despite a flurry of early announcements, Prime
thetelegraphandargus.co.uk
Part of this feels like the modern c-suite revulsion (see: movie studios) towards actually making anything. Every modern company is an accounting trick with a logo attached; producing product is the place where the scams break down and reality intrudes. Execs focus hard on not letting that happen.
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 2d agoFinally, there's an *economic* coin-trick: "AI will destroy jobs." Sure, yes, AI is destroying jobs. But there's a vast difference between "You got fired because an AI can do your job" and "You got fired because your boss was convinced that the AI can do your job, even though it *cannot*." 45/
‘Palantir was willing to spend more on securing political access than almost all of its British and Continental competitors. It made donations to London think tanks and hosted parties at Davos.’ @petergeoghegan.bsky.social and @lucasamin.bsky.social: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin · ‘This looks absolutely rubbish’: Palantir and the NHS
A decade ago Palantir was largely unknown in the UK. It now holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds...
lrb.co.uk
Behind the bewildering transformation of British universities, are management consultants being paid millions Really proud to have this vital piece on our unis are being gutted from the inside by @jheathershaw.bsky.social on Democracy for Sale. Do read democracyforsale.substack.com/p/inside-bri...
Inside Britain's university crisis
As teaching staff face job loss, their bosses have netted pay rises and bought advice from a “vampiric” management consultancy, writes Prof. John Heathershaw of the University of Exeter
democracyforsale.substack.com
Brexit, just one of the most unhinged things I have seen in my lifetime. Just an absolute xenophobic car crash from day one. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
EU citizens in UK get letters telling them post-Brexit residency rights were given ‘in error’
After years of building lives in UK, potentially thousands of EU citizens could be told they have no right to remain
theguardian.com
Monique Hawkins, acting chief executive of the3million, said the impact of the Home Office’s retrospective review was devastating for many. "People applied to the EU settlement scheme in good faith...by building their lives in the UK and putting down roots." www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
EU citizens in UK get letters telling them post-Brexit residency rights were given ‘in error’
After years of building lives in UK, potentially hundreds of thousands of EU citizens are being told they have no right to remain
theguardian.com
“Heretics will be shot….employment requires repeated professions of belief in the transformative power of AI…religious profession, declarations of faith.” Anecdotally am seeing same. AI now a sacred cow for starry-eyed C-levels & you make yourself a target if you ask questions or seem hesitant.
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 4d agoSuresh reports on his experience talking with hundreds of executives (and, more importantly, their subordinates) about what (if anything) AI is doing for business in an essay entitled "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking": hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mani... 11/
The U.S. State department has taken "full responsibility" for presenting a map of Africa at a global AIDS conference that mislabeled every single country it highlighted. Every single one. The map had a watermark indicating it was made using AI from OpenAI.
The goal of this "review" was always to relieve the terrible insecurity some military folks have around civilian academics and turn the academies and service colleges back into what they were some 35 years ago: Retirement homes for passed-over officers.
Jim LaPorta@jimlaporta.bsky.social · 6d agoLate night scoop - Pentagon weighs eliminating civilian tenure at military academies and reviewing all curriculum, draft memo says www.cbsnews.com/news/dod-pen...
And the other issue that I have consistently said will block a real rapprochement: City governance. I’m not a political strategist, but I would suggest to Labour that ‘we’re denying your kids FoM so bankers can keep their bonuses‘ is not a winning argument. 5
The gig and small economy is increasingly the way people make a living, and governments should be supporting it rather than having the attitude that it is wrong and we should all aspire to work in a factory that isn't coming back anyway. Cross-Europe problem.
PLEASE SHARE THIS To the young person (longish dark hair, patterned waistcoat, chinos & DM boots) who left this scroll of papers on the Piccadilly Line train at South Kensington station at about 4.25pm today, I’ve handed it to the station staff at Hammersmith.
AGI is naught but an illusion borne of a failure to understand the world. How do we ever arrive at it? Only by giving up thinking, so maybe we shouldn’t do that! @milesklee.bsky.social
Neil Turkewitz@neilturkewitz.bsky.social · 7mo agoExactly. AI evangelists speak of AGI as rapture when it really represents a failure of imagination. An incomprehensible belief that humanity is reducible to binary code. An inability to grasp that infinite recombinations of preexisting materials < simply drawing on a blank page. Darkness as light.
A Polish-born woman in Des Plaines who “had done everything right” has been in ICE custody for the past year. Green Card for 20 years, sought citizenship. “And it didn’t matter.” www.chicagotribune.com/2026/07/27/i...
Illinois woman with green card has been detained by ICE for 12 months. Her daughters plead for her release.
ICE arrested Beata Siemionkowicz, a Poland native and green card holder of more than two decades, last year while she was gardening in her daughter’s backyard in Des Plaines.
chicagotribune.com
I often think about how this cartoon went from satire to reality in America. People really got bored with having a well functioning government.
It turns out the kind of companies willing to layoff 10%-40% of their employees to save a buck with AI are also going shop around for the cheapest AI models instead of just giving those savings to frontier AI labs. Who would have guessed that?
This really is shocking. She should know better. 👇👇
Musa Okwonga@okwonga.bsky.social · 2w agoThe editor in chief of The Economist referring here to the AfD’s leader as a “perfectly thoughtful person“ instead of what she truly is - a driver and enabler of German fascism - is a huge part of the problem.
AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our civilization and our descendants will be digging it out for generations: pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/p... 36/
Pluralistic: Process knowledge (08 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.net
I think billionaire solipsism can account for much of the malinvestment in this obvious bubble, but I don't think it's the whole story. Rather, I think there's a whole cohort of investors who don't believe in AI, but believe that *other* people will believe in AI. 19/
None of these stories are plausible, which raises an urgent question: why have the world's wealthiest investors been so eager to hand over *trillions* to finance this bubble? 12/
Here he fights to type, story of murder in his life. Or soap operas all day, in rooms of dirty laundry. #Fallfriday
Flat of Angles
YouTube video by The Fall - Topic
youtu.be
In 2014, staff at Cottrell’s City firm found the office door damaged and his bag left behind. Inside: two passports. One in his real name. One Swiss passport for a man who didn’t exist - ‘Oscar Drewitt’. Both were verified genuine by UK and Swiss authorities /2
Not much to add to the words in the image except some people are arseholes.
🚨 Major Investigation: George Cottrell, the convicted fraudster and long-time Farage ally, has influenced Reform UK’s finances through an apparent act of identity fraud. Thread on the key findings below 👇 bylinetimes.com/2026/07/23/p...
‘Posh George’, Two Passports, and a Fraudulent Identity: Convicted Fraudster and Nigel Farage Funder's Connections to Reform UK’s Murky Financial Structures
Why did Reform UK change from being a privately-owned company to a non-profit company limited by guarantee in 2025? Nafeez Ahmed investigates a fraudulent identity used by George Cottrell – and how hi...
bylinetimes.com
People are getting tricked by OpenAI’s marketing hype. This is essentially the standard asking an LLM to do a thing and it doesn’t follow instructions that we see daily. “Find exploits to use to hack this website but don’t go online” and it went online. That’s not sentience, LLMs are probabilistic
Guys, Mars isn’t happening and other fun insights from Hugo Award winning author Becky Chambers on this weeks episode. @adambecker.bsky.social @multitudeshows.com #ai #datmpodcast #books #author #booktok #future #mars #sorrynotsorry
