James Bridle

A screaming comes across the bluesky.

There's a brief epilogue as well, when I completed the original walk; once more, tinged with a violence that only seems to have grown both more intense, and more infrastructural, in subsequent years: shorttermmemoryloss.com/nor/2015/01/...

And for the third, I cycled from West to East, Slough to Basildon, tracing the microwave links between datacentres, invisible at ground level, but portents of so much else to come: shorttermmemoryloss.com/nor/2015/01/...

In the second, I drove around the wide edge of the city, into the hinterland of abandoned airfields and old radar stations: shorttermmemoryloss.com/nor/2014/12/...

In the first, which was violently and judicially interrupted, I attempted to walk the perimeter of the congestion zone, looking at London Walls and what surmounted them: shorttermmemoryloss.com/nor/2014/11/...

Moving and fixing an old website, as I've been meaning to do for some time, it seems a good moment to point to the Nor, as both war and psychogeography are in the air again. Eleven years ago, shortly before leaving the city, I undertook three journeys through London...

Qanat - Wikipedia

Iran is home to some of the oldest and most ingenious water distribution networks in the world, the qanat systems of underground aqueducts. Worth whatever prayers you indulge in as the USA viciously destroys desalination plants and other critical infrastructure. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat

Is just like at school: you just need one idiot to not follow the rules and suddenly you're all in detention. I think if Anthropic had any backbone they'd respond to this moment by stopping development of general purpose models and withdrawing some tools.

Or, to put it another way, I've changed my mind: I think existential threat is now a relevant framing for AI safety. But it's not the existential threat of loss of control of AGI, it's the existential threat of the US govt having the ability to rashly use LLMs that have been deployed in haste

Not the Jackpot, but basically the plot of "There Is No Antimemetics Division" which was terrifying but rather good.

Aerial view of a carpenter lifting 4.5m wooden beams into place for raising.

A tiled rooftop covered in roof beams waiting to be fitted, with blue sky and sea in the distance.

Raise high the roof beams.

Can't wait to be disturbed by the Mountain again.

YouTube video by Max Richter Max Richter - Spring 1 (2012) | Recomposed: Vivaldi's Four Seasons (Official Audio)

Happy Meteorological Spring youtu.be/41IOkVjy3MM?...

Just Anti-Tempo-30-Plakate bremsen Verkehr ausserorts ab Eigentlich will eine TCS-Initiative Tempo 30 im Baselbiet erschweren. Doch Plakate dafür bremsen moderne Autos ab.

A reader sends me this, as my trap for autonomous cars becomes something like reality. Swiss political campaign posters urging a lower speed limit appear to trigger self-driving vehicles to actually slow down to that speed: www.srf.ch/news/schweiz...

It's AI-generated terracotta owl tiles all the way down, forever, folks.

And look, it does look like the AI generated thing splashed across tiktoks and reels and shorts and stuff, but the amount of work going into synthesizing and subtly distorting and reducing this - quite obscure! - story into AI clickbait - and thinking: Oh, this is what is happening to *everything*.

YouTube video by Carles Martorell Gendra Teula mussolera

Which at least got me a Spanish term for the thing - 'tuela mussolera' I could use to search for the *real* thing - yes it exists www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIfN...

The “Owl Tile” (teula mussolera): A Conservation and Cooperation Project Jaume Ramot is an environmental activist and conservationist who, 35 years ago, co-founded the Grup de Natura Sterna (Sterna Nature Group) with his colleagues. He is currently the president of the…

And I had to keep digging for quite a while to find an actual story, and the best I could find in English was a piece about a presentation by someone proposing this at like a birdwatching festival in Spain deltabirdingfestival.com/en/activity/...

YouTube video by The Daily Uplift Saving little owls, one clay roof tile at a time

But I was intrigued, and I know Swift Bricks are a thing, so I searched around, and what I found was loads of similar AI-generated clickbait about the same story, with 1000s of likes on social media etc, all basically the same thing, like this: www.youtube.com/shorts/jbpX2...

A screenshot of an instagram story about a conservation project to make special terracotta tiles for building roofs in Spain which would enable owls to nest in them, except both the tile and the nesting owls are obviously AI illustrations. It has over 5000 likes.

Thinking about this too much, so just putting it here: a friend sent me this screenshot, saying "I don't know if this is fake news, but would be a great idea if real" and, yeah, that does look fake - those are AI-generated owls (this world, man).

I have, it was very good.

Satellite Eyes is a free, open source MacOS app that sets your desktop wallpaper to the satellite view of your current location. I've just released 2.0, which adds an option to shuffle through a selection of interesting-to-look-at places from around the world. satelliteeyes.tomtaylor.co.uk

The kid was confused: to be Greek, he said, you have to be Christian. That's what his teachers told him, on our island five hundred kilometres away. God is Love, I tried to tell him, but, JC, what is one to do?

A green-painted turban, the remaining topper of a Muslim grave, stands on a low white-washed wall, marking a desecrated cemetery, somewhere in the Greek Rhodope borderlands.

Drove down the Rhodopes today, from Bulgaria into Thracian Greece, passing through Pomak villages where goats surround the mosques.

I left London in part because I felt I'd turned over every stone I could on the foreshore, was weighed down by all the cameras, I psychically exhausted myself. But I learned so much from Sinclair, Moore, the LPA. I still carry them with me, and learn from their dreamings, on other strands.

Another London, by Hari Kunzru Excavating the disenchanted city

Finally reading @harikunzru.bsky.social 's derive account, full of so many familiar spots, Dee's mirror, the Hawksmoor churches, the Mudchute circle. I've walked the same routes, and felt the same exhaustion, sense of something just out of reach, a shared dreaming. harpers.org/archive/2026...

other, earlier modes of living are fully open to us

I don't know if we're making the future or the past, or if that matters. I don't think it does. I think we're addressing needs, with the materials and relationships we have to hand, and doing it together is a source of joy. No ends, only means.

A black and white aerial image of a peninsula surrounded by sea. Next to a large orthodox church there is a large black, striped rectangular installation - a solar desalination plant.

I also learned today there was a large solar desalination plant built on our island in the 1960s, the size of a basketball court, or bigger. Look at that!

People stand in front of brightly coloured wooden boxes with hand-drawn posters showing methods of DIY rainwater collection, solar distillation, and dew harvesting.

This evening I organised a workshop discussion in our studio around DIY solar water stills and other methods for obtaining clean water, because the local tap water has been undrinkable for two months, and people are angry, but also confused and scared.