Andrew

This is one of those projects that would require such implausible resources for such little benefit that it's hard to figure out what's going on with it. Baffling.

Climbing the corporate greasy pole, ChatGPT style: the Stephen Collins cartoon If I tell you what you want to hear then you’ll think I’m a god!

ChatGPT's guide to Winning At Work
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Other random memories: the journalist who was Here For The Festival (of course) and was apparently under the impression that internet cafes offered secretarial services.

He did not get his typing done.

I have a lovely memory of one warm summer day in 1999, one customer around, tinkering with an attempt to see the eclipse being livestreamed from Cornwall - it didn't work, obviously - then stepping out into the road and watching it in a plate-glass window. Everything quiet and still.

Remembered this today and was thinking about that cafe. I ended up working there for a few years as my teenage job, and I guess everything since then has basically been different kinds of Helping People With The Internet.

"the cover was blue"

poster of great western railways visit cornwall it better than italy advertising campaign

"Why travel all the way to Italy when you can visit a place much closer by that is shaped like Italy?"

bigthink.com/strange-maps...

The Fahrenheit Thermometer in Gdańsk, in honour of the scale’s inventor, features two important design choices:

- What did Daniel Fahrenheit look like? We don’t know but we’re guessing “ripped”

- look we have to put Celsius on the scale as well or people won’t understand it otherwise

‘A collective anxiety attack’: the psychology of unexplained drone sightings across Europe Incursions have so far caused few physical effects but experts say such incidents can leave people feeling more vulnerable

A good article on the psychological aspects of the current European drone scare, which brings in the (Scandinavian) 1930s ghost planes, 1940s ghost rockets, and 1980s ghost subs (thanks to an interview with Robert Bartholomew, who was an inspiration for my own mystery aircraft research)

Tony Blair waxwork in soldier uniform gives ex-secretary a tickle The New Labour leader can be found dressed in combat attire, lined up near a Hugh Laurie waxwork.

Absolutely loving the idea that there are a string of little regional museums with second-hand mannequins in innocuous displays where everyone keeps going "wait, why is that..." www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Roman grave marker found in New Orleans yard left there by US soldier’s granddaughter Erin Scott O’Brien says grandfather Charles Paddock brought back artifact with him from second world war

I look forward to this update being forgotten and seeing the New Orleans Roman Gravesite turning up in crank history books in twenty years time www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Congratulations to the sub who wrote this headline, the Graun should give them a raise

good god, more checking reveals that Newcastle, Wolves, Bournemouth, Fulham and Burnley are also nervously checking the geoblocks! Just under one third of the EPL are sponsored by gambling firms that aren't licensed in the UK!

Looking into this turned up the detail that the 2018 reorg assigned the odd collection of things the Councils were meant to do to UKRI - so they inherited the wonderfully specific statutory duty to monitor the seal population.

With my ex-RCUK hat on, it's interesting that UKRI is (I think?) treated here solely as a funding body - I wonder what the situation looks like for the individual research centres.

Some very interesting if concerning stuff in here (it's particularly striking that the ONS, for all its recent struggles, is the most independent of the ones tested).

@ucl.ac.uk Staff and Students - join us for an Open Access Week webinar in which four speakers will consider the question: Who Owns Our Knowledge?

Wednesday 22 October, 11am - 12:30pm 📆

We hope you can make it! 👉 buff.ly/g0vGFc8

(Graphic from Open Access Week website, photo by Greg Rakozy)

"My wife’s phone blew up when we went through some little town and she got some signal. She kind of yelled, 'Oh my god, oh my God.' I was outside and we’re in grizzly territory, and I thought, 'Bear? There’s no bear.' She comes out and says, 'You just won the Nobel Prize.'"

All I could think of on reading this was "everywhere is spelled Ecclefechan and pronounced Kirkcudbright"

"AI slop" seems to be everywhere, but what exactly makes text feel like "slop"?

In our new work (w/ @tuhinchakr.bsky.social, Diego Garcia-Olano, @byron.bsky.social ) we provide a systematic attempt at measuring AI "slop" in text!

arxiv.org/abs/2509.19163

🧵 (1/7)

Unfortunately, however, Blackburne's reputation, both during his lifetime and subsequently, has been characterized, whether justifiably or not, more by unverifiable rumour and scandal than by his political and ecclesiastical accomplishments. A story was told that while in the West Indies he had served on a buccaneering expedition against the Spanish, and took his part of the booty. It was said that one old buccaneer returned to England and asked after his old chum Blackburne, only to be told he was now archbishop of York. Another story, recounted by James Granger, also illustrates the very worldly reputation which Blackburne enjoyed. The archbishop, it was alleged, was conducting a visitation to St Mary's Church in Nottingham. It was said that Blackburne 'had ordered some of the … attendants, to bring him pipes and tobacco, and some liquor into the vestry for his refreshment after the fatigue of confirmation'. The rector of the church, hearing of the orders, 'remonstrated with the archbishop upon the impropriety of his conduct' and told Blackburne that 'his vestry should not be converted into a smoking-room' (Malcolm, 199). The apparent failure of Blackburne to perform any confirmations while archbishop of York, however, calls into question the reliability of this account.

Wonderfully, the ODNB dismisses the story of him calling for drink and tobacco after a confirmation as probably apocryphal, on the grounds he never got around to doing any confirmations. Which feels like a bit of a double-edged defence, really.

today's footnote is Lancelot Blackburne, Archbishop of York 1724–1743, active in the Caribbean in the 1680s, during which he was - let us be clear here, there is no evidence at all that he was a pirate. None. At all.

His contemporaries had their doubts, though.

for a brief and confusing moment in 2010 the polls had a three-way tie (approximately). In the next couple of years it's not impossible we'll see a four or even five way one. Bizarre.

Great @reutersinstitute.bsky.social research published today. This on the trust of AI generated search has surprised me. Way higher than I would have assumed.

Still striking that billions(?) of people are using search products where less than 50% of people think the first result is good.

The lesson we should be taking from LLMs is the immense social value there is in having all kinds of material – all kinds of products of human intellectual labor – freely available online. They should be reminding us of the early utopian promise of the web. But now we must turn this around. The other side, of course – of course! – is that the companies making LLMs are not doing so with the goal of more easily sharing the material that people have made freely available on the web. They are doing so with the goal of enclosing it, of converting the products of free human activity into commodities.

In which @jwmason.bsky.social puts his finger on a central contradiction of AI: it’s both a result of free sharing of information online, and a threat to it.
jwmason.substack.com/p/actual-int...

Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet | Samanth Subramanian A colossal volcanic eruption in January 2022 ripped apart the underwater cables that connect Tonga to the world – and exposed the fragility of 21st-century life

This was really interesting www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

yes, but your cat *is* great

The great debate going forward is not about this specific technology (and its enormous energy demands - the debate is also about that) but about the conditions under which people will continue to be able to share the products of intellectual work with each other on the web.

What LLMs are doing, fundamentally, is reaping the benefits of a vast spontaneous, directly social, decommodified decentralized production of use values.

In all the endless discussions of LLMs, there’s a point that is, on one level, obvious, but that I feel does not get sufficiently foregrounded: LLMs are transforming material that people have put up on the internet.