David Hughes

The Hubble space telescope can observe parts of space approximately 13.4 billion light-years away.
This is still not far enough away for Bertie Ahern to fuck off forever.

Melanie Phillips & @MelanieLatest Zohran Mamdani leads among Jewish voters by a 17-point margin in the race to become New York City's next mayor. Mamdani, a Shia "Twelver" Islamist, will bankrupt and Islamise New York and pose a threat to its Jewish community. With their Pavlovian reflex to support the Democratic party and its anti-west, anti-white, anti-Jewish ideological dogmas, it was entirely predictable that before long these US Jews would themselves become a threat to the Jewish people. That moment has arrived.

I recall the lads agreed: even a trace, a suspicion of racism in public life was utterly unacceptable and it all had to be annihilated to the subsoil with nuclear weapons. Also, here’s a BBC and Times pundit doing more fash crank racism in one tweet than most humans will do in their entire lives.

Might be worth reading for when this circus reaches Ireland.

@zotero.org is the most useful and ethically uncompromised piece of software still under active development, at least for a certain subset of society.

Responsible and ethical use of the brain-rotting machine. Aye. Ok.

I mean, given its provenance, librarians should be doing this anyway.

Sick of AI Slop? DuckDuckGo Now Lets You Block AI-Generated Images DuckDuckGo admits the tool 'isn't perfect,' but claims it will 'greatly reduce the number of AI-generated images you see.'

www.pcmag.com/news/sick-of... #AI #yourewelcome

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed thr...

Here's another study showing that using ChatGPT melts your brain.

arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

Express Newspaper front page with image of starving child FOR PITY'S SAKE STOP THIS The suffering of little Muhammad clinging on to life in Gaza hell shames us all

This is what happens in a genocide when it’s too late to stop it and the denial and humanitarian camouflage have already killed thousands and thousands more are on the brink because of a criminal regime. This is when the enablers jump ship. It’s a stage in #genocide.

The absolute, wanton cruelty of this.

Metadata for article [extended abstract] entitled "AI Could Have Written This: Birth of a Classist Slur in Knowledge Work"

The author works for Microsoft research.

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Please enjoy this turtle being given the gift of speed, and immediately using it to chase a kitty

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear etc, etc. Glad it's just the gards that get to do this and no one else ...
Gardai to get powers to monitor WhatsApp chats
archive.ph/vS0XP

The Squid Game episode The Starry Night is just ... As emotionally wrenching as Gganbu was

I guess you maybe could use it to write your resignation letter.

Oh yeah. I like diamond OA; free to publish in and free to read, but not free to produce - that money (and time) has to come from somewhere.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted

Five people standing on stairs

Tiled pattern of a long white building built into a floor

Five people standing on stairs

A woman standing in a room with study booths

Members of the @aslibraries.bsky.social committee met for our annual planning meeting in Griffith College today. Huge thanks to @dimphne.bsky.social for hosting us and for showing us around the sun-dappled library!

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation. There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time. For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual. As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone. Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism. No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

I think it's now possible to make a poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts.

Text 1. Wilhoit's Law, born as part of a 2018 blog comment
crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...

Pretty impressive to discover a new physics using probabilistic analysis of word patterns. Why didn't I think of that?

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."

Where is the moral panic?

Where are @lisanandy and @Keir_Starmer?

Or are we saying Rod Liddle can use his national platform to call for state violence and it’s fine

But if Bob Vylan chants about actual state violence it’s “incitement”?

At least try to be consistent.

an AI slop map of the united states that seems to be trying to indicate what the most popular food is in every state. it contains such gems as Alaska's favorite food being a reddish slab labeled "ALASKA", Oregon's favorite food being what looks like a steak sitting on top of a cereal bowl labeled "APPLE", California's being simultaneously a goblet full of red liquid labeled "SHRIMP COCKTAIL" and a beige slab labeled "TATO", Wyoming's being a crudely drawn bison labeled "WYMONG" and an oblong apple on Alabama labeled "CRANFISH". There is also a square to the right of Florida that just says "SALMON" for no reason.

the same image in context of a reddit post from the subreddit "r/dataisbeautiful" saying it's "the most popular food of each state from voting [OC]"

some frankly amazing AI slop that someone decided to try and post on the r/dataisbeautiful subreddit

Go fuck yourselves

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Waiting for Business Source Ultimater.

Orange, I think you mean.

[2506.08872] Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed three sessions under the same condition. In a fourth session, LLM users were reassigned to Brain-only group (LLM-to-Brain), and Brain-only users were reassigned to LLM condition (Brain-to-LLM). A total of 54 participants took part in Sessions 1-3, with 18 completing session 4. We used electroencephalography (EEG) to assess cognitive load during essay writing, and analyzed essays using NLP, as well as scoring essays with the help from human teachers and an AI judge. Across groups, NERs, n-gram patterns, and topic ontology showed within-group homogeneity. EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use. In session 4, LLM-to-Brain participants showed reduced alpha and beta connectivity, indicating under-engagement. Brain-to-LLM users exhibited higher memory recall and activation of occipito-parietal and prefrontal areas, similar to Search Engine users. Self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning.

New study on the effects of LLM use:
Quote:
"LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. […] Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels."

The take a chair joke could have come from the original, but I don't know; like Highlander, there can only be one Frank Drebin.