Simon Hildrew

"What Was Israel Supposed To Do After October 7?" Is Asking The Wrong Question Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

"What Was Israel Supposed To Do After October 7?" Is Asking The Wrong Question

A much more useful and interesting question is “What were Palestinians supposed to do in response to all of Israel’s abuses prior to October 7?”
www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/what-was-i...

Mass starvation spreading across Gaza, aid agencies warn, as pressure on Israel grows – Middle East crisis live More than 100 aid agencies, including Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and Oxfam, say ‘our colleagues and those we serve are wasting away’

www.theguardian.com/world/live/2...

The image at the top of this live blog makes me sick to my stomach. Enough is enough.

Various bits of packaging laid out left to right with the Amazon envelope far left and empty torn Apple Watch packaging towards the right.

First time I’ve had an Amazon delivery stripped of the contents.

Frustratingly Amazon are unable to replace it and can only offer a refund of the 21% off price (a price that is no longer available). That’s kind of annoying given that this is a problem in their supply chain.

#firstworldproblems

@jessicaelgot.bsky.social I’d really like to see some exploration into how many people who threatened to leave Massachusetts as a result of the wealth tax, actually left? Or similar wealth taxes elsewhere.

It seems that totaluptime.com (and the DNS service they offer) is errrr, down.

I'm more excited about the release of this later this week than I have been about any TV for a long time 🤖

I'm honestly starting to wonder if we'll see the extinction of both the UK's main political parties in the next election cycle.

I didn't vote for Labour, but didn't expect them to be as hapless as the Tory government they replaced.

Who or what has this hold over Starmer? Maybe he's not sleeping. 😖

Meet the lost jewellery hunters: ‘I will be for ever grateful. It wasn’t just a ring’ Metal detecting isn’t just about searching for ancient treasure – the missing belongings of living people are just as precious. Meet the volunteers reuniting the two

If you want to read something to rejuvenate you hope in humanity then cast your eyes over this: www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

YouTube video by Simon Plots Unboxing huge A0 iDraw V2 pen plotter / UUNA TEK Christmas competition prize!

Hey #penplotter Bluesky 👋

I won an UUNA TEK A0 pen plotter in a Christmas competition and I’ve made a video about unboxing it and using it for the first time to plot the famous Schotter.

A lot of assembly, use of vpype to generate gcode, and a floor that isn’t flat.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=VwX6...

This seems like a prophetic voice in this arena; I wonder what else is in that book.

bsky.app/profile/saga...

Popping the Tech Bro Bubble | Molly White From libraries to online, our information system is being dismantled

I’ve followed the highly competent @molly.wiki for longer than I remember but I don’t think I have heard her speak until her highly articulate discussion with @racheldonald.bsky.social on Planet Critical this evening. Can recommend.
www.planetcritical.com/p/molly-white

Tesla Model Y (2025) review: an exercise in irritation Tesla Model Y (2025) review: an exercise in irritation

@teslatakedown.co.uk you should share www.carmagazine.co.uk/car-reviews/...

It’s an excellent review of the latest Tesla.

“At a glance
Pros: good battery efficiency, AWD model is properly quick, great charging network
Cons: uncomfortable ride, irritating cabin ergonomics, everyone will hate you”

Sledgehammer-wielding Musk critics smash up Tesla in London art project Campaign group Everyone Hates Elon organised protest with car bound for scrap heap ‘to create debate about wealth inequality’

So @everyonehateselon.bsky.social's Tesla smashing event went well: www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

I understand and like the idea behind this, but how do you teach a science class that isn’t rooted in curiosity and explanation?
To me that is exactly what science *is*. People being curious and searching for answers in an effort to understand the world.

A question that I honestly think is in the public interest for Kier Starmer to be asked (we live in a new normal where he is cosying up to an authoritarian leader): “what will you do when Trump insists that the UK deploys troops to help the USA invade Greenland or Canada?”

AI is transforming the art of the possible ADVERTISER CONTENT FROM MICROSOFT HOSTED BY THE GUARDIAN | AI has forever redefined the rate of innovation

No worries. Also noticed it on advertiser content such as www.theguardian.com/advertiser-c...

Hi BTW - hope all is well!

I think this is on the supporter flow thank you page from what I can tell. Most places on the Guardian now uses the Share API to delegate where you might want to share (so will show Bluesky if you have a client and Truth social if, god forbid....) which seems ideal. /cc @markjamesbutler.bsky.social

Adolescence was hard-hitting TV, but online safety needs to be nuanced | Letter Letter: Instead of banning phones in schools, teach online engagement as part of the curriculum, writes Mark Rowland

This letter in the Guardian misunderstands tech companies as benevolent or at worst inert. In reality children are a source of profit, and by having an age limit they don’t enforce can simultaneously make profits and point to the age limit when it all goes wrong.

www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Met raids Quaker meeting house and arrests six women at Youth Demand talk At least 20 officers forced their way into property and police said some present were planning direct action in London

Posted this afternoon... www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

This is outrageous and I hope it is brought up at PMQs or as an urgent question this week. Can't see anything on this in Guardian yet but seems like a important watershed moment @damiengayle.bsky.social.

Went along and held a sign at Edinburgh's #teslatakedown protest this morning. Friendly bunch of around 15 people. Lots of support from passing traffic; I'd say 40-50% of traffic that passed honked or gave thumbs up. About 5% obscene gestures. And two nazi salutes... really.

A protest sign with white text on black background and the text BOYCOTT TO卍IC TESLA

Too cloudy for the eclipse, but I did bring a sign, albeit with an accidentally reversed swastika (as I was drawing this, I was reflecting on never expecting to draw one again after school history lessons).

Someone tell me more about Edinburgh please. Also, is the partial solar eclipse a sign?

Yeah. Also not sure that’s actually Obama. If it were their handle would surely be their website domain? More likely a squatter trying to build some rep.

You could. But a) n-gram is too coarse a mechanism in the era of LLMs that links semantic meanings rather than word sequences and b) that would only give correlation. Would only vaguely work when only a small number of sources used that exact wording. Useless for anything even a little granular.

I have questions.

Because we don’t know how the training works really so if the observed output is similar to a phrase in the input it would only show correlation not causation; unless you had a mechanism that tracked the training as evidence that input source X made param deltas Y which then caused output Z.

That's 18Gb of data per input source. There are high millions of input sources so you're talking many petabytes of data to track it and you'd need to build datasets that let you query it in useful ways.

Technically possible, but would be expensive. I'm sure someone has written some papers on this…

I would imagine the problem would be storing the relationships. GPT-4 has something like 1.8 trillion parameters. That gets stored once as the model but we'd need to store the delta for each source. Let's say a typical source impacts only 1% of parameters meaningfully, that's 18 billion data points.