Calum Alasdair Young

I've been getting back into the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series after many years, and the most relatable part is how everyday objects like doors and elevators have been imbued with artificial intelligence and it just makes them obnoxious and frustrating to use and everyone hates it.

“We are told that AI is inevitable, that we must adapt or be left behind. But universities are not tech companies. Our role is to foster critical thinking, not to follow industry trends uncritically.”

“Why has virtually every country in the world seen an abrupt rise in extremist politics, especially on the far-right, starting at approximately the same date the iPhone was released”

The most important question in politics but maybe not a hard one

Results for Dutch elections are trickling in. As expected, some surprises.

My thoughts:

Is this the end of populism in The Netherlands? No.

Freedom Party (PVV) has lost seats, but the far right vote has splintered. Big wins for JA21, a PVV-light party: 30% of PVV voters in 2023 now voted for JA21

Cheating with an LLM is the easiest thing in the world for a student to do, but it creates a massive, laborious headache for a prof, if you intend to take it seriously. There’s meetings, emails, discussions, moral dilemmas. It’s just incredibly burdensome, on top of everything else right now.

consider that the psychotic loop of chatgpt mostly seems to be 'the chatbot repeating your own ideas back to you and telling you they're brilliant' and then consider billionaires and the people around them

Half the major parties in the United Kingdom appear to be in a desperate arms race to see who can be performatively cruel enough to foreigners to earn a "based" quote tweet from Elon Musk.

Pupils fear AI is eroding their ability to study, research finds One in four students say AI ‘makes it too easy’ for them to find answers

I think we have a window of opportunity to stop AI from ruining us that is slowly closing

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Any form of media that involves an angry man telling an audience what to be angry about for several hours a day is probably not good for the human brain

Wheat paste poster that says the all the world is dying and the new world struggles to be born now is the time of monsters. There's a picture of Elmo

Morning walk

What Do We Have To Lose If Keir Starmer won’t even make a moral case against deporting our friends and neighbours, then what is the point of him? Plus: some natural borders; and the non-existence of grey, and other letters.

"You don’t fight the politics of violence by quibbling with the details. You stamp it into a million pieces! You draw a f*cking line!"

If Keir Starmer won’t even make a moral case against deporting our friends and neighbours, then what is the point of him?

Once again tapping my 'AI is a huge existential threat to the Internet and e-commerce' sign:

How many people will generative AI kill before we actually care? Too many.

My latest newsletter is about how generative AI companies are risking the lives of the most vulnerable by releasing tools that affirm dangerous delusions -- and the potential human consequences.

And it's about why nobody seems to be freaking out about it.

whatwelost.substack.com/p/how-many-p...

Moving from "what's the most authoritative answer?" to "what's the most plausible answer?" turns out to have downsides.

A lot of work in the last couple of years on the 1945 world order has convinced me that a lot of people think the flawed and half-broken system of 2025 is an easy status quo and not something we crawled over broken glass to get

think if you're broadly a centrist and were suuuuuper concerned about attacks on free speech from the left and so you decided to give the right a hearing then you need to realise you were taken for QUITE the ride (and don't really have anyone to blame but yourself)

[me, a journalist who spends all day every day on a social media app where the discovery algorithm is personally controlled by its owner, captain birdseye] you know, a lot of people are talking about fish fingers, we should probably cover that

This times 100.

Not wishing to sound like a member of Dad's Army, there were Britons struggling 100 years ago who suffered from real economic anxiety. And when they were called upon, they went off and fought fascists, rather than marched for them.

In More Good News, apparently Ethan Coen and Trisha Cooke are doing a 'lesbian B-movie trilogy' so we can expect a 3rd to go with this and Drive Away Dolls.

And this has happened *without* a massive sea change of actual popular opinion in favour of these thugs; the elite flip has not been responding to the public, but to social media

Agree with David here. Liberals and the Left shouldn't get paralysed by panic over milieus that have been around for decades and have been successfully mobilised against before.

What is depressing though is the cowardice of a Labour government in the face of a movement that wants to destroy it

Each alleged mass shooter is even more On the Computer All the Time than the previous one. Probably nothing to worry about there

I don't think it is callous of me to observe that it is weird to see the PM of the UK, the leader of the Opposition of the UK, and the ex UK PM all putting out solemn and devastated tweets about the death of a podcaster who is only a big name if you're constantly on Twitter

so much is bad right now but the AI stuff in particular is making me insane. a desperate attempt to smother all human creative labor at an absurd cost to the planet by some of the most short-sighted, rapacious, and pathetic people who have ever lived

M365 Copilot fails to up productivity in UK government trial : AI tech shows promise writing emails or summarizing meetings. Don't bother with anything more complex

Two trials will be repeated endlessly despite always producing the same results:

1) Does UBI work? (yes)
2) Does AI improve productivity? (no)

“I don’t want asylum seekers to live on my street” is genuinely a wild thing to say as a notionally progressive politician

As good a explanation of how GenAI produces its outputs as I've seen for a while

Co-signed times a thousand. “Other people have no interiority” is, fundamentally, a deeply evil belief to hold which will lead you exclusively to terrible places