Dr Charlie Harry Smith

@leaypi.bsky.social You’ll be pleased to know Father Christmas has good taste in books. Can’t wait to dig into it!

my sense is most philosophers agree: this is exactly wrong

The NDL team’s had a rocky year, from what I hear… They need you!

YouTube video by GameTrailers The Trolley Solution - Official Gameplay Reveal Trailer | Latin American Games Showcase 2025

GOTY contender (philosopher’s choice, at least)? youtu.be/oONZ_f4kwiU?...

That reminds me of CGP Grey talking about how he obsessively plays one crappy pop song on endless repeat while writing, for precisely the white noise reason! To each their own!

Never understood how people write with music on! Even stuff with no words stops me from thinking properly. Loved Radio 4 Comedy while cooking, though, to forget work in the evenings…

What’s Happening to Reading? For many people, A.I. may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end.

"Some kinds of writing shouldn’t, or perhaps can’t, be summarized." #authors

www.newyorker.com/culture/open...

Quite enjoying tracking and rating restaurants with this new app Beli that @laurelboxall.bsky.social introduced me to! beliapp.co/wMFSbUBdxVb?...

Resharing for the after work crew!

As a result — and although I must stress that this thesis in no way represents the government’s views, only my own — I hope the conclusions will be of interest to theorists, identity experts, and policymakers alike!

I then ultimately deploy this analysis to generate a coherent policy position, resolving what I see as a series of interlinked dilemmas: unchecked central oversight, persistent exclusion, and neoliberal economisation.

Throughout, I unpack the deeply ethical and political reasons for Britain’s uniquely troubled history with identification systems, using lenses of freedom and control, access and inclusion, as well as surveillance and privacy.

Drawing on interviews with 51 identity experts across industry, government and civil society, I construct something of a normative history of British identity systems, from 1414 to 2024.

In it, I evaluate the British state’s successive national digital identity systems using the tools of liberal political philosophy – for the first time.

🎓 I’m pleased to share that my doctoral thesis is now available for download (freely – it's Open Access!) from the Oxford University Research Archive: ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid...

I’ll brave the rain, lightning and hail, he thought. It doesn’t look that bad!

bsky.app/profile/heta...

Creme fraiche, mozzarella and a block of Parmesan with a bunch of radishes and leaves of wild garlic sit on a scrubbed pine table.

This week’s Kitchen Diary observer.co.uk/style/nigel-...

Can you run a company as a perfect free market? Inside Disco Corp For over a decade, a $20bn manufacturer has been conducting a radical experiment. No one has a boss or takes orders. Their decisions are guided by one thing, an internal currency system called Will

Can you run a company as a perfect free market? Inside Disco Corp www.ft.com/content/c043...

Fascinating experiment. Sounds wildly inefficient in many ways, and not sure I’d love working there, but glad someone’s trying it!

I think the suggestion that any kind of human-to-human interaction should be replaced with human-to-chatbot interaction should be scrutinized as a kind of moral rot. It’s antisocial ideology and should be treated as such

A light blue diagram depicting the sea, with the water's surface at the top, and just below it is an outline of the Mary Rose, with the depth (12m, 40ft or 6.7 fathoms). There is a line showing the seabed, which takes a rapid dive into the vertical...

On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, we thought we'd answer a question that's often asked,

"If they raised the Mary Rose, why not raise the Titanic?"

Allow our scaled diagram to explain...

Congrats Myke!

Will let you know if they get back to me, but I’m not holding my breath…!

Ha! I’m one of those (well, for DuckDuckGo searches)

Submitted a complaint to Meta too

Great article! Had no idea how insanely readable COBOL code was until now. Let alone the gendered/gatekeeping dynamics behind its historical denigration or modern downplaying of the number of active coders…

Between the tepid bath and the cloud of vapour: a plea for pragmatic ambition A man visiting a health resort is sitting in a steam box. Engraving, May 1869. Wellcome Collection In my most recent weeknote, I promised a blog post… Somewhere in all this between the t…

This blog post by @mattedgar.bsky.social resonated. 'Pragmatic ambition' is a good term that I will no doubt be using soon.
blog.mattedgar.com/2025/03/29/b...

Congratulations Pat! Hope you enjoy the well-earned fruits of retirement. Please post photos!

Commiserations! ❤️