David Peter Wallis Freeborn

It appears that a Polymarket account called "Magamyman" made $515,000 in a single day betting on last night's U.S. strike on Iran, with the first trade placed 71 minutes before the news broke publicly.

Is philosophy too precious for AI? On writing, thinking, and the ego of authorship

New post 🚨 Is philosophy too precious for AI? briandavidearp.substack.com/p/is-philoso... ... on the science-humanities divide in LLM appreciation

The two types of AI denialism: the people who look at this and go 'nah, the machines will never get that smart' and the people who say it and talk like it is a thing you can meaningfully prepare for.

Something a little bizarre with a UK debate over a failing funding model with higher education whose primary benchmark of comparison is a high fees US model rather than much nearer EU member state models that manage to put university teaching together with low or no tuition fees.

UK expands Hong Kong visa scheme in wake of Jimmy Lai’s prison sentence Exclusive: Home Office ruling means thousands more Hongkongers will be eligible to come to the UK over next five years

Some genuinely good news - Home Office does the right thing.

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

Bluesky Map Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!

bluesky-map.theo.io

I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars?

These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research.

So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...

Try imagining some research assistants and lab technicians to conduct the thought experiments for you?

Nobody in Britain pays any attention to Australian politics, but One Nation overtaking the Coalition in the polls has distinct parallels with Reform leading the Conservatives. Parties on the radical right are coming for centre right parties across the world...

Poll via AFR / RedBridge Accent.

Bilbo looking at his phone top on bottom is ChatGPT After all, why not? Why shouldn't I keep it? You're absolutely right — you found it, it's been with you a long while, and it's only natural to feel fond of something that's served you so well, especially when someone like Gandalf suddenly seems to want it for himself.

Three errors here. First, in confusing some kind of SEND classification (20%) with EHCPs (5.5%).

Secondly in assuming it gives automatic right to DLA. Though there is a strong ECHP/DLA overlap.

Third in assuming that those moving to DLA to PIP never work (it's not an out of work benefit).

View of Tower Bridge from Northeastern University London campus

In case anyone is in London and would like to come, I’ll be giving the Daniel C. Dennett Lecture in Culture and Technology on February 19th at 6pm.

Lifelong Learning and the Many Aims of Higher Education

philevents.org/event/show/1...

Has there ever been any poll showing the public this united? yougov.co.uk/technology/a...

Well done to the US for heroically deterring Russia and China from considering regime change abroad by doing it themselves and suffering absolutely no consequences whatsoever up to and including having their allies fall short of actually criticizing them for it.

to the contrary, this is an amazing opportunity for cartels to launder drug money into legally owned American assets

There's an argument to say, Labour is dead anyway, so better to have someone who will implement policies we agree with.

Very far from perfect, but I'm highly impressed at how well Gemini (nano banana pro) could handle such a complex prompt, first try.

Given a simpler 3x3 grid, I think it does rather better (still not perfect, but it is impressive!)

Let's make a 6x6 grid of film x style

The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Tolstoy)
1984 (Orwell)
Waiting for Godot (Beckett)
Ulysses (Joyce)
The Chrysalids (Wyndham)
The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood)

16th century woodcut engraving
Ukiyo-e
Rubber Hose
Disney Renaissance (1990s)
Studio Ghibli
Pixar contemporary

screenshot of my post

Big new blogpost!

My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more.

--> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

Representation in science and trust in scientists in the USA - Nature Human Behaviour Druckman et al. document gaps in trust in scientists in the USA. People from groups less represented among scientists (for example, women and those with lower economic status) are less trusting. Incre...

Paper out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com:

1) those groups (women, African Americans, lower SES, rural) that are underrepresented in science have been less trusting of science.

2) If you improve representation in science, you improve trust among those groups.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This time it got the grid right.

These are quite good (though it failed at the grid)! "Please generate a 3x3 grid of non-anachronistic historically accurate New Yorker style cartoons about artificial intelligence, one for each decade starting 1940"

Ah, you're awake! Hit your head pretty hard there.

Neoliberalism what!? Donald who!? Modal Logic? Incompleteness Theorems? Large Language Models? Hitler? Oh yes, he's a fringe politician in Munich.

Come on, let's get you up. We have a lot of work to do unifying science and eliminating metaphysics.

Sure, Gemini 3 is very smart, but also I accidentally convinced it that we were in a simulated future by switching model mid-conversation...

One fun thing that ChatGPT's transformer based image generation model can do (arguably better than other kinds). Give it a random selection of 10 images and ask it to mash them together into a harmonious new image inspired by those images. The results are always chaotically entertaining.

Why Wikipedia editors have deleted entries from the “List of unusual deaths”: “hippos are extremely dangerous and very aggressive and there is nothing unusual about hippos killing people” “the man was working on the toilet, making his death inherently less strange than if he had been using it” “no longer an unusual or unique occurrence” regarding impalement by beach umbrella “being hit by multiple motorcycles in a race is not an unusual death” “fatalities involving objects or animals being launched into oncoming traffic are considered commonplace” regarding a Canadian couple’s fatal collision with a “flying bear”

recently discovered that wikipedia volunteers have a hilariously high bar for what constitutes "unusual death"

Whenever a dynamical law divides the state-space into such separate cycles, there is a memory of which cycle they started in. Such a memory is called a conservation lan, it tells us that

I’ve been casual student of physics for four decades. Why did no one ever explain to me so clearly what a conservation law is?

From Susskind and Hrabovsky (2014) The Theoretical Minimum.

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This is why reading basic material from brilliant thinkers is so often worth the investment.