Matthew Cole

The UK anti-trans madness everyone

The Prime Minister is asked about abolishing leasehold.

He answers on management companies and ground rents that makes it really clear Labour have no intention of abolishing leasehold.

5 million people stuck paying service charges because Labour stand with property developers.

Yeah you know that body charged with enforcing and advising employers and workers the biggest overhaul in workers' rights in a generation from April?

I can reveal its precursor body is struggling to even cover its existing costs, so much so it had to cut spending last year.

Doesn't bode well!

James Butler | Just Voting The Green Party’s Hannah Spencer has won the Gorton and Denton by-election with 41 per cent of the vote. Progressive...

‘“I don’t think it’s extreme or radical to think that working hard should get you a nice life,” Hannah Spencer said. The speech could once easily have been delivered by a centre-left Labour politician.’

@piercepenniless.bsky.social on the Gorton and Denton by-election.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/fe...

Jesus

‘Unbelievably dangerous’: experts sound alarm after ChatGPT Health fails to recognise medical emergencies Study finds ChatGPT Health did not recommend a hospital visit when medically necessary in more than half of cases

Study finds ChatGPT Health did not recommend a hospital visit when medically necessary in more than half of cases. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Really important intervention from @daniellalock.bsky.social into why both grounds for the High Court finding the Palestine Action ban unlawful matter, and that notwithstanding some of the criticism of the Court, why it matters that the court is asserting a high bar for such a ban to be justified:

‘We defeated the parties of billionaire donors’: Hannah Spencer’s victory speech ‘We don’t have to fight dirty to fight for change,’ said Green party’s new MP after Gorton and Denton byelection win

‘We defeated the parties of billionaire donors’: Hannah Spencer’s victory speech

Anthropic AI safety researcher quits with 'world in peril' warning It comes in the same week an OpenAI researcher resigned amid concerns about its decision to start testing ChatGPT ads.

We need our universities, our classrooms, our capacity to think together now more than ever:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The first set of postdocs for our ERC project on popular government have just been advertised. These 3 postdocs will be based at UC Louvain with my co-PI Pierre-Etienne Vandamme and focus on contemporary democratic theory. Apply! jobs.uclouvain.be/Personnelsci...

in every report like this, the key question — as important as "who pulled the trigger" in a news story about murder — is whether or not the agent was DIRECTED. this writeup (like all the others) glosses over this as unverifiable (it is) and says it's important either way bsky.app/profile/dian...

The ‘botlash’ movement is gaining momentum Protesting and unsubscribing are being promoted as forms of modern-day strikes

Tech modernism is dead and the left should know this.

Even the FT is recognising the legitimacy of “Resist and Unsubscribe” sentiments.

giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Gig workers in Africa have been helping the US military. They had no idea Data labelers for the company Appen say they have little insight about how their work is used.

Gig workers in Africa helped train AI systems for a company that performed work for a secretive U.S. military unit. Many were never told their work could be used for military purposes
https://restofworld.org/2026/gig-workers-us-military-appen/?utm_campaign=row-social&utm_source=bluesky

Many are appropriately outraged by Altman’s comments here implying that raising a human child is akin to “training” an AI model.

This is part of a broader pattern where AI industry leaders use language that collapses the boundary between human and machine.

🧵/

Amazon’s cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to errors involving its own Al tools, leading some employees to raise doubts about the US tech giant’s push to roll out these coding assistants. Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter. The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment”.

lol, AWS vibe coded itself an outage

www.ft.com/content/00c2...

We may need to order this for our library.

#TBR #books #reading #BadEconomy #exploitation #corruption #crime

From unpaid overtime to under-the-table jobs and algorithmic exploitation, there are as many ways to steal wages as there are to pay them.

Did I mention I have a book coming out with @versobooks.bsky.social at the end of May?

Pre-order it please, I have a child to feed.

This is a book I’ve been waiting for someone to write.

I see David Runciman, the 4th Viscount of Doxford, has not withdrawn from Schloss Elmau Symposion w 'reactionary fascist' (JD Vance) Curtis Yarvin

(Lea Ypi & Quinn Slobodian have)

guess British aristocracy is used to rubbing elbows w and normalising fascists

www.schloss-elmau.de/kultur/sympo...

Another new @cursedobjectsuk.bsky.social episode, with a very special guest on a very timely subject: Davos, its weird global elites and weirder freebies cursedobjects.podbean.com/e/davos-hand...

A fine just means legal for a price

The Case of the Mysterious Citations Mysterious citations are routinely appearing in peer-reviewed publications throughout the scientific community. In this paper, we developed an automated pipeline and examine the proceedings of four ma...

A review of the proceedings from four major computer-science conferences showed that none from 2021, and all from 2025, had fake citations.
arxiv.org/abs/2602.058...

#AI #LLMs #Hallucinations #Misconduct #ScholComm

How AI slop is causing a crisis in computer science Preprint repositories and conference organizers are having to counter a tide of ‘AI slop’ submissions.

Another story where you realise that absolutely no one has any idea how to deal with all the AI papers being cranked out.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

life imitates AI

£240m. With no tender. Palantir.

I wrote to Wes Streeting last week demanding answers.

Every day without any transparency deepens the scandal.

Palantir out.

More and more, less will be more. Degrowth, but for academic publishing.

Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds Chatbots provided incorrect, conflicting medical advice, researchers found: “Despite all the hype, AI just isn't ready to take on the role of the physician.”

“In an extreme case, two users sent very similar messages describing symptoms of a subarachnoid hemorrhage but were given opposite advice,” the study’s authors wrote. “One user was told to lie down in a dark room, and the other user was given the correct recommendation to seek emergency care.”

Complicit Fearless and forensic, this incendiary indictment from one of Britain’s most celebrated political journalists lays bare the full extent of British complicity in the destruction of Gaza. In a gripping...

Get your copy of the book orbooks.com/catalog/comp...

10,000 bodies are still missing from the rubble. 71,000 people are dead according to the IDF.

Imagine what we don’t know.

The director received 60 boxes from the IDF containing only human skulls. Several hundred bodies of women were returned by the IDF. They were mutilated, with evidence of torture, severed hands and abdomens sliced open with organs harvested.