@mattpotteruk.bsky.social
Journalist, author, magpie, scriptwriter, nerd. Washington Post, BBC, Literary Review, Independent. Nonfic books WE ARE ALL TARGETS & OUTLAWS INC. Science, languages, virology, art, illicit networks, cyber, psychology, weird, prehistory, subculture. He/Him
X is designed to radicalise people.
The algorithm promotes Elon Musk's agenda to promote racists and people who want violence bought - specifically - to the streets of Britain.
Members of Parliament, major institutions and the media should not be there.
news.sky.com/story/the-x-...
Every year we get closer to this happening on the news
05.11.2025 14:06 — 👍 660 🔁 207 💬 5 📌 1“The suspects, including two Ecuadorians, a Venezuelan and a Colombian, were remanded in pre-trial custody after their court appearance in the Azores on Tuesday, said police. “. & the sub was seized. It IS possible to do without blowing them up.
05.11.2025 11:57 — 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0This really the cracking of speeches: a banger.
Worth reading in full.
That paper also had a weird post-script:
It was consistently cited in the 1980s by US rock bands on 'comeback' press tours, claiming to have cleaned up.
It became part of their standard redemption story, to the point where I suspect it was part of the onboarding script at the Betty Ford Clinic.
1978 paper from the journal Science: Choice behavior in rhesus monkeys: cocaine versus food' by T G Aigner, R L Balster, Aug 11 1978: Abstract: "Rhesus monkeys were allowed to choose between intravenous injections of cocaine and food reinforcement for lever pressing. A choice trial was available every 15 minutes continuously for 8 days. The animals chose cocaine almost exclusively, which resulted in high cocaine intake, decreased food intake, weight loss, and marked behavioral toxicity. The study provides evidence of the reinforcing efficacy of cocaine."
The legendary 1978 study: Rhesus monkeys had a choice of 2 buttons every 15 minutes.
One dispensed food, one cocaine.
The monkeys "chose cocaine almost exclusively, resulting in high cocaine intake, decreased food intake, weight loss, marked behavioral toxicity".
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/96531/
So having a few friends round for a small get-together is a crime now, eh.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Good. We need to start realising that government trying to manage risks down to zero is impossible, and very expensive to try, and then think more broadly about what that should mean.
To replace existing deregulatory initiatives.
Reddit post featuring the OP’s haul of wild mushrooms they have picked, and a caption about how they are letting ChatGPT identify the fungi for them.
I think I’ve maxed out on What Can Possibly Go Wrong, and i’m proceeding straight to Oh Fucking God.
28.10.2025 17:53 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0My first band in the 1990s was named Spooky Grapehead, after a Trevor & Simon Saturday morning kids’ TV sketch in which they wanted to carve a Halloween pumpkin.
They kept downscaling (“What about the poor children who can’t afford a pumpkin?”) via satsuma head etc - & ended up with a spooky grape.
Pack of ‘Halloween Persimmons’ from M&S (product of Spain, 3 per pack)
See also: What could be more seasonal and spooky than A PERSIMMON aaaaaarrrrgh 👻
Let us carve it
"Can't miss the boat"
"Embrace it or be left behind"
"You'll be replaced by someone using AI"
These are all marketing slogans that prey on FOMO rather than value propositions. Anyone making decisions based on this kind of shaky logic is just another layer in the pyramid scheme.
#Chatbots parrot #Putin's propaganda about the illegal invasion of #Ukraine - www.theregister.com/2025/10/28/c... "Fake views from Moscow's pet media outlets appear in about one in five responses"
28.10.2025 13:17 — 👍 1 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
Packshot from M&S of ‘Menacing Mac & Cheese’
Pack of ‘Wriggling Worms’ (cocktail sausages)
A breaded chicken ‘Box of bats’
‘Zombie Bao Buns’ - bit of a stretch, this one
I mean I’m pretty jaded with marketing angles, but whoever at M&S decided to call Mac & Cheese “menacing” and market chipolata sausages as worms & severed fingers is basically my hero.
28.10.2025 13:27 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0Invoking DNA to say brands have power is like saying ‘Reverse the polarity!’ for any & all emergencies in science fiction.
No-one knows what the fuck it means. They don’t know why they say it. They couldn’t explain what thing A has to do with thing B. But it sounds brainy to the ill-informed.
Hell of a way to come out about it, and I’m damned if I’ll stop masking (hey it’s what I’m good at), but in a way it’s nice that people know that the effort’s there. ;)
27.10.2025 12:28 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Trump: The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs. The ad was for $75,000. They only did this to interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, and other courts. TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A. Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT 1 ReTruth 3 Likes 10/23/25, 7:39 PM
Trump is pissed about an ad that Canada recently ran in the U.S. showing Ronald Reagan talking about tariffs in 1987.
“Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED.”
A spread from Business Traveller magazine, featuring the opening of an article. The headline is says: Neurodiverse Navigation: Growing awareness of conditions like autism and ADHD is changing business travel as we know it. Words: Matt Potter. Illustration: Eoin Ryan. The image is an abstracted, blurred and red-toned background of an airport with outlines of a morass of red signs overlaid on each other, for planes, no entry, crowd control etc., and looking at it in the foreground, the blurred and lone outline of a human with a suitcase. The figure is hollow, with light hining through it. The overall vibe is Radiohead-disassociative and futurist-dystopian.
Few experiences are more stressful, spooky, uncanny & disruptive for the Neurodivergent than international travel.
Here's why it's the stuff of nightmares, & how the travel industry can change that. (& may be starting to.)
This felt good to write, at last.
www.businesstraveller.com/insights/fea...
Screenshot of the intro to the linked Reddit post in which a lawyer gives his account of the opposition counsel submitting an argument that was entirely hallucinated (including non-existent sources in citation) by ChatGPT - and its dismissal amid the resulting fallout.
Second page of a Screenshot of the intro to the linked Reddit post in which a lawyer gives his account of the opposition counsel submitting an argument that was entirely hallucinated (including non-existent sources in citation) by ChatGPT - and its dismissal amid the resulting fallout.
Oh no, not again.
Lawyer submits an argument to the court which is entirely hallucinated - including non-existent precedents & citations - by ChatGPT. Fallout ensues.
Please, for the love of Svarog, tell your friends & colleagues tonight that ChatGPT is not Google.
www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedd...
🚨🚨Excellent news: After three years of reasoning, pleading and conceding, the EU has had enough.
On Monday, the EU's MS are expected to back a new bill that will permanently cut #Russian gas supplies to #Hungary and #Slovakia — whether they like it or not. 🧵
www.politico.eu/article/eu-c...
This a genuinely shockingly low number.
20.10.2025 18:42 — 👍 11 🔁 3 💬 4 📌 0
Chat GPT gets the riddle wrong claiming it is the letter ‘o’ of which there are, it says, two in the word ‘man’ and four in the word ‘king’.
Chat GPT and Gemini AI get the riddle wrong, claiming it is ‘e’ - of which it says there are two in ‘man’.
Chat GPT claims the answer is ‘e’
Chat GPT claims the answer is ‘parents’ because a man has two, a king 4, and a beggar none.
This Reddit thread started with a comedy riddle.
The thread quickly devolved into people asking Chat GPT and Gemini AI to answer it for them.
Which became more comedy.
www.reddit.com/r/comedyheav...
Cannot generate simple excel files on pro version Question So I have used ChatGPT pro for a while now and recently I have been facing an issue while trying to collate data from pdfs and put it in an excel sheet where in my chat it keeps asking me questions when it finally gets down to generating an excel sheet it never gives me the me the link to download the file. After multiple attempts when it does give me a lin k to download the excel file I rec an error which says file not found. Starting to grow frustrated with this now. Look forward to any suggestions to tackle this #problem
This person is paying OpenAI two hundred dollars a month to have a chatbot gaslight them about making an excel spreadsheet
20.10.2025 02:08 — 👍 5866 🔁 884 💬 148 📌 155The main achievement of the tech industry has been increasing the flow of money from people who make or do things to people who already have more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes
19.10.2025 16:36 — 👍 5655 🔁 1976 💬 8 📌 11
A painting of a very large hog.
AWS is down, post hog
20.10.2025 10:05 — 👍 4670 🔁 1030 💬 64 📌 83
Screenshot from the New Scientist article: "You might wonder why chilli plants would produce colourful, eye-catching fruit, packed with aroma compounds, only to lace them with this unpalatable molecule. Well, it’s because birds don’t have these receptors, so they are immune to capsaicin’s effects. Researchers believe chilli plants evolved the ability to produce capsaicin as a selective deterrent, discouraging mammals – which destroy chilli seeds during digestion – while having no effect on birds, which spread seeds intact. Capsaicin is so effective at this task that it has been added to birdseed to prevent it from being eaten by squirrels. It is also used to prevent rats and mice from eating poultry feed and has been effective in preventing rodents eating wildflower seeds and destroying nests of rare ground-nesting birds."
Birds lack capsaicin receptors & are immune to chilli's heat; most mammals have them & won't touch it.
It's a successful adaptation by chillis to ensure the berries are eaten & spread only by the farthest-ranging seed-dispersal agents. 🤯
From @newscientist.com www.newscientist.com/article/mg26...
