Kit Colliver

The Bishopsgate Institute and the Museum of Transology in London. For more of Scotland, the Lavendar Menace archive is in Edinburgh.

Zotero and Obsidian

I genuinely appreciate this update.

This legal set-up is not fit for purpose. The government needs to amend the Housing and Planning Act 2016 to create a route from CPNs to landlord bans.

Local authorities can seek banning orders against the worst landlords, but at the moment this requires at least one (and usually more) criminal convictions. This means they have to start their enforcement all over again when they identify a slum landlord who needs to go.

CPNs carry advantages: they're a faster process and carry bigger fines than we see issued in the courts. But they're a barrier to removing slum landlords from the PRS.

The legal landscape for enforcing against slum landlords is broken. The Renters Rights Act is pushing local authorities, who hold the powers to enforce against housing offences, to use more civil penalty notices (fines) against slum landlords rather than pursuing criminal prosecutions.

Slum landlords continue to operate in the modern PRS:
● keeping properties with hazards detrimental to tenants' wellbeing,
● engaging in behaviour that is detrimental to tenants' wellbeing,
● repeatedly failing to meet regulatory obligations, and/or
● attempting to prevent effective enforcement.

We need to bring back the concept of the slum landlords. Victorian hovels and Rachmanite exploitation look different today, but these practices haven't gone away.

We have established that the language used to talk about criminal landlords is not fit for purpose. Even the professionals tasked with upholding housing standards can fail to see health hazards like severe damp and mould or unsafe construction as criminal offences.

It's been a big project, with four work packages covering everything from organised crime in the PRS, to the experience of tenants abused by their landlords. Here are a couple of my main take-aways:

Reports Reports from each work package Criminal landlords in the shadow private rented sector in England Short summary available here Full report available here Enforcement against slum landlords Short sum...

Last week saw the culmination of two years of fascinating work on criminal landlords operating in the private rented sector. We launched our final reports live to an audience of almost 80 local authority, policing and third sector professionals. www.criminalityintheprs.org/outputs-and-...

Mismatched solid blue and yellow and blue striped socks, against a terracotta background.

Latest socks, of many produced this year.

Action to undermine the profits of arms manufacturers, you say?

Does body doubling help? There’s a zoom writing group I use with morning and afternoon sessions www.szwg.co.uk

Why Language Models Hallucinate, by Kalai et al. Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such “hallucinations” persist even in state-of-the-art systems and undermine trust. We argue that language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty, and we analyze the statistical causes of hallucinations in the modern training pipeline. Hallucinations need not be mysterious—they originate simply as errors in binary classification. If incorrect statements cannot be distinguished from facts, then hallucinations in pretrained language models will arise through natural statistical pressures. We then argue that hallucinations persist due to the way most evaluations are graded—language models are optimized to be good test-takers, and guessing when uncertain improves test performance. This “epidemic” of penalizing uncertain responses can only be addressed through a socio-technical mitigation: modifying the scoring of existing benchmarks that are misaligned but dominate leaderboards, rather than introducing additional hallucination evaluations. This change may steer the field toward more trustworthy AI systems.

Ironically, it appears that AI chatbots hallucinate for the same reason that students feel compelled to use them:

They were socialized in a high-stakes testing culture that rewards guessing and maybe getting it right over admitting when there's something you just don't know.

For my brother’s kids, I am Pibl Kit (their parent’s sibling) and they are my niblings.

How much did this failed experiment in social cleansing cost, we wonder? God forbid they engage in meaningful consultation before titting about like this.

It’s an important and exciting project and the contract duration and scope for independence are rarely seen in the world of fixed term research positions.

I don’t know the PI personally but my partner speaks very highly of her.

This looks rather wonderful!

You’re brilliant, Ruth. So well-deserved.

Reading this back and boy am I excited about Ruth’s zines and sexual health.

It’s here!

ruthpearce.net/2025/05/26/p...

Also the folks at that drop-in are lovely. Get tested! In person! All the ones you actually need! No appointments!

Lolilol I’ll omilil milk lmikmll I’ll il I’ll lm lam zzi

📌 thank you

Gratifying to see a legal view line up with my own instinctive interpretation. @reactiveashley.bsky.social is arguing that the Supreme Court ruling is consistent with implementing a ‘bigots toilet’ and retaining trans-inclusive single-sex facilities.

Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention Red Flag Alert on Anti-trans and intersex Rights in the UK Released on 30th of June 2025

All of the actions described above fit neatly into the 9th Pattern of Genocide: "Denial and/or Prevention of Identity." As we have repeatedly stated over the years, genocide does not only manifest in the killing of an entire group. In the case of trans and intersex people, genocide is often perpetrated by making it impossible for individuals to exist as their true selves. The erasure of a group from public life is a step towards an attempt to erase that group's existence, which is the very definition of genocide. The UKSC's decision puts trans and intersex people at peril by forcing them to either out themselves or break the law, both of which run the risk of violent backlash. To explicitly confirm this, gratitude was extended in the UKSC ruling Ben Cooper KC, acting on behalf of Sex Matters. The latter is an explicitly anti-trans lobbying group that has since written to the NHS claiming that transitioning "becomes a major, permanent social problem for those (transgender) young people" — a claim that flies in the face of all serious research on transgender youth.

In the time it’s taken me to write up my research on the impact of voter ID on trans people, the UK has managed to slide from a position of impinging on trans citizenship rights to setting off alarm bells at anti-genocide organisations.

My overall impression is that the EHRC guidance does not make it clear how to deliver trans inclusive services.

It is effectively advice on how organisations can exclude trans and gender diverse people from services, which is an unusual approach for a human rights organisation to take.

Spent the entire evening writing up the EHRC response for @rtie.org

And that’s with members’ feedback already collated.

That guidance and the consultation are trash - lengthy, confusing, mired in bigotry - and I feel like my eyes are bleeding.

Graphic with a purple background. In a bright green text box at the top it says "The EHRC's Consultation on their draft Code of Practice closes today!". Underneath are three drawings of placards, they say "Trans people belong", "Inclusion not Exclusion" and "No segregation! Trans Liberation". The Scottish Trans and Equality Network logos are at the bottom.

Its the final day to complete the EHRC's consultation on their draft code of practice. If you want to fill it in and share your voice in support of trans inclusion, today’s your last chance!

We've created a full guide w/ Mermaids & TransActual, on our website - www.scottishtrans.org/supreme-cour...