Chris Hanretty

Philomena Cunk against a collection of classical statues. "Antigone's death is even more tragic than it actually is, which makes her a tragic hero"

Philomena Cunk looking thoughtful. "Goya continued to paint tapestries until 1792 when serious illness left him dead for life"

Philomena Cunk looking thoughtfully into the distance. "Society is slowly becoming more contemporary now"

Philomena Cunk looking into camera on a beach. "Diderot's Tahiti represents a typical male fantasy in which attractive young women are eager to engage in sexual activity with the French"

@gralefrit.bsky.social You have to see these! A friend of mine has been collating a series of images entitled "Things my students have written turned into Philomena Cunk quotes" and they're just glorious.

demand an upgrade to business as compensation

Tomorrow Meloni's government will become the fourth longest-serving government in the history of the Italian Republic at 1,025 days, overtaking Renzi (2014-2016).
The top three are:
Berlusconi II - 1,409 days (2001-2005)
Berlusconi IV - 1,283 days (2008-2011)
Craxi I - 1,058 days (1983-1986).

Don't want to be petty, but Medvedev losing in Cincinnati because he overheated makes me feel better about some of my own tennis games.

(I realise this is a bit "Nepo blundering after two hours makes me feel better about losing to scholars mate", but still)

A Simple Model of Online Platform Enshittification This is a model of “Green-Daying”:= services often start out as a core product with a well-defined set of features for a target user-base, and slowly morph into a generic, engagement-hungry machine.

economic models are surprisingly fun devices for expressing strident opinions with no empirical basis.
attempt to bait theorists into working on platform design in tech with a caveman model of my own.
apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...

I would say, "not impossible in a democracy to have judicially-determined unamendable provisions", but my main example is India, so 🤷‍♂️ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_s...

It's something that's designed to be use when drafting an electoral system, when you generally don't know which parties are competing. If you want something UK specific, you can try and add other things in. It is just a regression, but regressions are useful!

The number of districts in which the nationally largest party is the locally largest Is there a simple connection from the number of districts in a country’s electoral system to the number of those districts in which the largest party nationwide is also the largest in the dis…

If a party is the largest party nationally, in what proportion of districts is it also the largest? @laderafrutal.bsky.social suggests it's the number of districts, raised to the power 7/8ths, divided by the number of districts

fruitsandvotes.wordpress.com/2025/08/08/t...

Noooo you must carefully engineer your prompt in a way that properly accommodates the properties of the token-based model space, the better to manage the quasi-aliasing that happens at token boundaries; moreover the probabilistic character of model outputs makes the tool a poor choice for the evaluation of certain deterministic world-knowledge topics; furthermo 34% 34% I don't trust this fucken thing I don't trust this fucken thing 14% 14% 0.1% Ю score 55 2% 2% 0.1% 70 85 100 115 130 145

People who know more than me: Is the 'bs in blueberry' thing related to tokenization? Has someone done trace probes to work out why this happens?

Deep cut...

Just watching a Kenji Lopez-Alt video where the saltiness of the pasta water is described as "about half as salty as your tears", which manages both to be highly evocative and not particularly useful

I once heard Eric Adams described as "trying to win every interaction on a moment to moment level, leaving the overall experience incoherent and him coming off worse" and I sometimes wonder if that's not a good description of Starmer's government.

Raise a half pint in my name; you can invoice me and I'll try and get the money cleared by my bank without the extra mortgage

The Oxford Handbook of Swiss Politics, at £142.50, might be reasonably priced if you receive a Swiss salary global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Animated Politics, a new teaching resource. This video series explains the logic, math, and science behind politics.

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We have a new teaching resource for you: Animated Politics.

This video series explains the logic, math, and science behind politics.

Watch and share: goodauthority.org/news/animate...

Thread from someone who has thought a lot about this

Does providing kids with meals at schools increase their performance?

This new meta-analysis addresses this question very rigorously.

They find that school-meal programs in high-income economies have minimal impact on students' behavior, health, and education.

www.iza.org/publications...

Yeah, I can understand a different bot that is more like a call centre operator, and a *lot* of queries will involve referring on. I think this will generate false expectations

The problem is that for this kind of system to work, it needs to be integrated with the parliamentary email system, and that poses all kinds of security and confidentiality issues

You have to have a human in the loop, IMO. Otherwise all the information is pooling in some weird RAG correspondence pool

I think there's a lot that AI can do in triaging parl'y correspondence and highlighting common areas of concern - but this ain't it boss

That's it, I've found the internet's worst person.

Who is now aged 36.

Great to see research which tries to reconcile conjoints & real world choices, but strange for this bloot to lead w/ description of past research ("sexism is… consequential for voter behaviour") rather than the actual finding ("no evidence for [fx] of voter sexism on support for women candidates")

Rates of incorrect tactical voting are higher when there are big changes in party support and changes in boundaries, so 2024 was crazy for a reason

Determining the Effect of Strategic Voting on Election Results Summary. Speculations about whether strategic voting made a difference to the outcome of an election regularly whip up the passions of pundits, party strat

Generally, between a tenth and a third(!) of tactical votes are cast incorrectly (i.e., for third placed parties) doi.org/10.1111/rssa...

This is interesting research. I do wonder though about the idea that the current YouGov MRP constitutes ground truth. It would be good to see whether people are guessing on the basis of "what happened last time out".

Who is currently working on their CP syllabus 😇?

My open access chapter may be of interest to you, which I'm happy to re -share: www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap-o... polisky @elgarpublishing.bsky.social

How then do you interpret s.8 of the Allotments Act 2025? Is that a power that the SoS has, or something else? www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/1...

But she could have done otherwise, and I don't think she should have that power. I don't think central government should have powers over local allotments.