John Blake

FWIW, I think Klein's piece is unnecessarily complimentary about Kirk's achievements. Just as it undesirable to speak ill of of the recently dead, it is not obligatory to be nice about them. But the fundamental truth in that final line is what matters.

"We are all safe, or none of us are."

And that goes for Washington DC as much as it does for Washington, Tyne and Wear.

Let’s go with the idea that these drones over Poland mistakenly ended up there. All the more reason for NATO to announce a no-fly-zone over Western Ukraine in order to prevent such unfortunate mistakes in the future. Simple. Close the skies.

HOW STEPHEN. HOW HAVE YOU MADE THIS ABOUT HARRY POTTER

My video about how LLMs are not search engines has led to many, MANY comments telling me that I should be using Perplexity. Some insisting that Perplexity does not hallucinate.

Out of a list of 26 papers it just provided me (in "Research" mode) 4 were real. FOUR. 85% hallucination rate.

This They Might Be Giants TONIGHT SHOW performance of "Birdhouse In Your Soul" from 1990 remains firmly lodged in my noggin thanks to the Tonight Show Band's full commitment and Doc Severinsen's incredible trumpeting... It took an already great song and made it transcendent.

There almost certainly IS a show to be made out of Hogwarts—BBC Mallory Towers seems to have been on forever and they can’t even do magic, although they are unfailingly good at Horses; you could even do a weird Grange Hill style thing. But remaking the whole story again seems bizarre.

Possibly the best reason to tune into Bluesky is Stephen Bush’s insatiable (and obviously entirely correct) demand for someone at HBO to talk us all through their thinking here.

Not if you weren’t CERTAIN that he wasn’t yours AND he was the last living connection to the wife who was, allegedly, the only thing you loved. (And possibly even if you were certain BUT you didn’t want to to give Aerys the postmortem satisfaction of humiliating you further).

I don’t really see that: that he thinks Tyrion might not be his biological son doesn’t justify any of the horrific things he does to him.

has an affinity for the dragon skulls in the Red Keep; the death of the Martell kid who cannot commune with dragons sets up that there might be someone who can; and Tyrion is, in so far as any one is, the hero of the books.

“The dragon has three heads” we are forever told-Jon, Dany, Tyrion. Also explains why Tywin resigned as Aerys’ Hand (which otherwise makes little sense), but he’s never entirely certain Tyrion is not his, but the timing makes sense. Also Tyrion’s hair is often described as being white not blonde; he

I’d always assumed Tyrion ends up as king bcos the last Targaryen king was his father, having forced himself on Joanna, but even tho the series had Tywin say “you are not my son” they couldn’t give enough time to Tyrion being able to ride dragons (which is where I think his arc with Dany goes)

In the latest post on our Substack I try to make sense of the mutual incomprehension between teachers & students about the role of AI.

Is it OK for students to use AI to write their assignments if that's the most efficient thing to do?

If not, why not?

substack.nomoremarking.com/p/what-is-th...

I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. She told me the equivalent in Ukrainian is ‘The only free cheese is in the mousetrap’ - which is so much better

Re: stripping citizenship, look. There is no legal mechanism for him to do it. The very fact that he is talking about it tells you, yet again, what he is. He’s an aspiring totalitarian who wants absolute power over people’s lives and to use it to reward friends and punish enemies. That’s really it.

New York Times editors as they're handcuffed and sent to a concentration camp: "Experts say this is a bad thing to happen."

This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use development is illegal to build these days.

Hugh Muir recalls the response of London Mayor Ken Livingstone to 7/7 from Singapore. I agree that, despite his flaws & failings at other times, that this was an important message
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Tuesday

Movie you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Star Wars, Star Trek, LotR, Marvel.

www.amazon.co.uk/review/R1BCZ...

This is very funny and exactly how I’d expect AI agents to work right now (rather erratically) but also how I’d expect humans to behave (trolling the AI to buy tungsten cubes)

Worth a watch:

Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

Not that her skills as a journalist ought to matter: the President of the United States shouldn’t be calling for any accredited journalist to be fired.

Am also obviously massively, bitterly jealous you got to do this, and am considering whether it is ethical to try to persuade Lucasfilm to let me write “Weapons of Mas Destruction: How One Hard Working Politician Was Scapegoated For An Empire’s Crimes” as a revisionist riposte.

Are we still doing “delete your account”? If not, can we bring it back for this?

This is truly wonderful to hear