MC

What if the government announced that asylum decisions would be made by this one guy who reckons he’s pretty good at guessing people’s ages?

When we use AI rather than humans to make decisions, it has a sheen of scientific, quantitative accuracy. But it’s still just guessing.

Born 20 or so years after the last pit in my village's immediate vicinity closed, I still grew up with orange water running in local streams, and conifer plantations used to cover old pit heaps. Wind turbines would have had drastically less environmental and visual impact, bring them on.

Do you think being British helps you see through the bullshit respect for CEOs? Like here we're basically brought up to take the piss out of anyone successful - and I feel like that's not the case across the Atlantic.

New research from MIT found that those who used ChatGPT can’t remember any of the content of their essays.

Key takeaway: the product doesn’t suffer, but the process does. And when it comes to essays, the process *is* how they learn.

arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088...

Yellow Submarine Roll

I appreciate the author talks specifically about the dads in her parenting whatsapp group not talking about holiday care, but it's a hell of an extrapolation from that to "dads don't care about this". Excluding dads from the conversation or painting us as feckless doesn't help things get fixed.

Also, childcare funding policy in UK actively discourages higher birth rates. If 1 child in full time nursery costs almost half the family monthly income (or more!) it becomes literally unaffordable to have more.

Can't speak for Japan, but policy levers in UK would need to sort access to housing and pay for under-30s - hard to consider having kids if you're in a rental taking high % of already-low monthly income.

James Copley: How Luke O’Nien became anti-Jack Rodwell and a modern-day club icon Luke O’Nien’s journey from potential Sunderland flop to club legend and double promotion winner is a real life Roy of the Rovers story

Felt compelled to write something about Luke O'Nien and his journey at Sunderland.

He has become the perfect antidote to the Rodwell, Gibson and Ndong era that preceded him and is now a club legend in my eyes.

Any shares appreciated ❤️

#SAFC

I had to explain to a younger colleague how we used Encarta before internet access was common - they looked at me like I was describing some long-lost ancient technology. Which I guess I was, really.

Big Dan Ballard ❤️🤍❤️🤍 #safc

Relatedly I'd also be interested in your thoughts on how/why England's PISA maths and reading scores increased post 2015 (see e.g. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5f2029...) - obviously they fell in the 2022 cycle, but up to then things were looking up.

Where is the PISA data from? It doesn't look as bad as this in OECD's own analysis (www.oecd.org/en/publicati...)

And they state "Performance in mathematics dropped sharply in 2022 on average across OECD countries after remaining stable in 2003-2018."

"In response to this latest news, traders seemed to become frantic tick tick tick tick tick tock"

I won a book about how to be more sceptical. I can't believe it!

I won a book about how to be more sceptical. I can't believe it!

I won a ton of sugar. Sweet!

And yeah totally agree on this point. The whole system, end to end, needs to see improvements. I have relatives who receive adult social care, so am very aware of how broken that is too.

I think we should expect better than this. I can't put a number on how many hours is an acceptable wait, but "less than this" seems a reasonable start point. And the experience of being in a&e is truly awful. It's awful and stressful for the staff too!

And I should add that luckily she seems to have got out of it all OK, but it scares me that scraping through like this is considered adequate by some. We should be doing better, and we should be able to question why it's not better - and we should be hearing plans that will make it better.

Just before Christmas my mum, in her 70s, fell and split her head open, at around 9am. She had to wait until 3pm for an ambulance. She then waited an hour in the ambulance to be let into a&e. She was in a&e, concussed and with a head wound for almost 12 hours. Released at 5am. The system is broken.

Need to convert those chances to avoid more situations like Stoke, Blackburn, etc. Won't feel comfortable without another goal or two.

"I think we should let something objectively bad happen for several more years, potentially changing the fabric and future of the country for the worse, just to avoid hypothetical criticism" is a really, truly, terrible take.

Also - apparently quite a lot of people now use ChatGPT slop for their abstracts (despite it largely producing slop) because, it turns out, a lot of people aren't good at summarising complex information...

Over a century of people saying "it's the fault of capitalism" hasn't exactly shifted the dial has it. But these recent terms, for specific processes and experiences, clearly resonate with people - they've got people thinking and talking about the issues, which might in time even feed in to change!

This is the content pivot we've all been waiting for - go earn those big influencer bucks on Meta platforms!

Let's reclaim the word - we can call teenage horses ponies if we want. We can be the start of something here!

Maybe Big Horse is suppressing the truth about ponies...

I wholly believed a pony just meant a teenage horse until I was about 20. I thought it went foal -> pony -> horse. I only learned the truth when I said out loud something like "what happens when ponies turn into full size horses?" and people laughed.

It infects thinking within businesses too. Support functions that allow the profitable bits to do their jobs better? Get rid, they're not themselves profitable! Developments that could generate profit in 5 or 10 years? Why invest when you can cut those jobs and get that bottom line better right now!