Latest Badenoch: “If [Andy Burnham]’s not calling an election, why’s he talking about things happening in 2030?” - alarming the extent to which so much of our political class cannot process the idea of “planning for events four years in the future”.

the ideal academic life is being an eccentric Victorian lord. Invent a stamp licking machine at 22. Get elected to the Royal Academy for counting the beetles on your estate. Die in an arsenic explosion. The perfect life.

I absolutely do not care or need to know how many small boats crossed the channel in the past 24 hours. Stop putting it in the news.

1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.

The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science

As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at ...

arxiv.org

'Bluesky' was an ancient pasttime in which the poster attempts to find a sentence that exactly splits their audience into scornful anger and mild amusement

leon@leyawn.bsky.social · 3mo ago

um, so everyone cheering on egypt in the world cup realizes how the pyramids were built right? but i guess that's a conversation you're not ready to have

Have said elsewhere that Farage has seriously underestimated how poorly "It's me or Count Binface" could go for him in a country that loves the absurd being memed into existence, and a national media that literally calls the summer "silly season"

The prospect of Nigel Farage fighting a people vs the establishment by-election in which the only other candidate is Count Binface - is too hilarious for words.

Davey is right. Remember, no MP can actually resign. It’s the law. A quaint mechanism is to apply for a nominal office of profit under the Crown. That triggers a disqualification. That office is granted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. She could say no.

Americans – whether leftist, liberal, MAGA or anything else – really, profoundly do not understand how they are looked upon by the rest of the world. No nation is looking over and thinking "I want me some of that".

Will say that, anecdotally, it felt to me that Goodwin's history of misogynistic comments cut through in Gorton and Denton too. I remember hearing that there was a surprising amount of anti Goodwin content coming from usually non political personal Instagram accounts of young women.

M☿th@monroetempleton.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The fake plumber openly boasting about being sexist while his party was promising a nightmarishly misogynistic rollback on women's rights feels like an important part of the Makerfield result no one will talk about

Per most recent figures, net migration to NI *over the past 22 years* has been ~62,000 people. Only 3% of Northern Ireland’s population currently belong to an ethnic minority. Pogroms in Belfast (as with Ballymena last year) are just gutter-level "One Is One Too Many" racism, and nothing else.

Northern Ireland, functionally, has no immigration. Net immigration last year was about 8000 people in a population of 2 million, and that was a record.

SpinningHugo@spinninghugo.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Really? That is your view? Really?

The racist pogroms in the UK are going to produce even more calls for compromise and understanding with the racists’ “reasonable concerns” but that is exactly what got us here.

I'm not sure what kind of economic model you get to where a wealth tax is existential for the future of economic growth but zero net immigration is just vibes and social cohesion. When I did economics they taught us that you needed inputs if you wanted outputs but I guess the literature has moved on

BREAKING: Reform UK leader Nigel Farage bought a £1.4 million property in cash shortly after receiving a £5m personal gift from billionaire donor Christopher Harborne, according to property records seen by Sky News.

One of the largest drops in nhs waiting lists on record, which no one will now hear about. Opportunity cost from all the leadership turmoil www.england.nhs.uk/2026/05/heal...

NHS England » “Huge moment” as the health service hits 18-week target amid half-a-million waiting list drop

NHS England » “Huge moment” as the health service hits 18-week target amid half-a-million waiting list drop

england.nhs.uk

He’s going to rename it 10 Downing Streeting isn’t he

This is not funny, health secretaries only do this when they're extremely distressed, etc.

All the developers 404 Media talked to were excited to try using LLMs at work at first, or were at least curious about them. Their feelings about the tools, based on their personal experience, are now overwhelmingly negative. AI is rotting their brains www.404media.co/software-dev...

Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains

“It's making me dumber for sure.”

404media.co

All the "is Miliband popular/competent/acceptable after losing 11 years ago" is missing the most crucial point: that the most dramatically satisfying ending is that the guy who lost the election after which everything went wrong comes back and fixes it all. Ask Chekov. Ask Aristotle

There's many things you can criticise this leadership challenge for, but you can't say it's not a fitting tribute to Starmer's premiership, from the complete absence of a plan for something that was obviously going to happen, to policy as an afterthought, to banal talk of undefined "Labour values".

The media will need to do better on this. He can't just be allowed to refuse to answer. He is possibly the next PM and is in hock to a billionaire

Paul Brand@paulbrand.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Nigel Farage refuses to take a question about his £5m donation from a crypto billionaire.

Every time the PM takes “full responsibility” he sacks someone else. It won’t just be Labour councillors losing their jobs.

do think one of the big problems of the era is that a lot of mainstream politicians have forgotten that you just can't convince everyone; the point of successful electoral politics is to convince the people you can convince and to *defeat the rest*

👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻@oldenoughtosay.com · 5mo ago

all I have to add to this discourse is that some people really are just shitty, horrible people who will vote for and genuinely want shitty, horrible policies. it’s up to the rest of us to work as hard as we can to counteract them.

In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis. Paywall bypass: archive.is/6RdK9

“We found two of the worst men in politics to replace one woman who was competently doing her job”

Ian Dunt@iandunt.bsky.social · 5mo ago

McSweeney: "We procured two strong candidate for [the PM]: One was Mandelson and the other was George Osborne." Christ above. What did the weak candidates look like.

BBC coverage here is really weird in framing something that happened before the Act comes into force, and isn't protected by the act anyway, as part of the Renter's Rights Act. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Renters’ Rights Act: My tenant owes £15,000 in rent, but I can't get them out of the property

Landlords tell BBC News why they fear new laws could make it harder to remove problematic tenants.

bbc.co.uk

If you did a list of every voter group they need, from “Central Belt woman who does a competence check on the SNP-Slab” all the way to “your classic yuppie who went Tory to Labour in Kettering” and went “what’s their big doubt about Labour?” - they’ve delivered it!

I used to think thw German Greens transitioning Germany away from nuclear and renewables and back toward coal was the most anti-green Green Party policy I'd see in Europe, but subsidising fossil fuel usage during the best transition opportunity of our lifetimes gives it a run for its money

Farrukh@implausibleblog.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Zack Polanski says blanket support for everyone for fuel and energy costs, and then claw back through wealth taxes for those who don't need it This is simple, pragmatic and the least bureaucratic way of ensuring everyone who needs support gets it, in the fastest possible way 👏