A historic line was crossed this week…

NUMBER CRUNCHING **£7.4m** Fine Ben Delo agreed to pay in 2022 after pleading guilty in the US to anti-money-laundering failures at BitMEX, the crypto exchange he founded **£4m** Donation Delo, since pardoned by Donald Trump, has made to Reform UK

I hear neither Reform nor donor Delo want this news getting round. Via Private Eye

Please stop treating this person as if they’re stupid or uneducated!! This type of post is the work of a con(spiracy) artist! A grifter. Someone who makes money from content that gets engagement & convinces actually uneducated people to drink deeply from it and part with their money.

Break Big Tech: Dismantle the root cause of online harms Platforms like X, Facebook and Instagram harvest our personal data so that they can target us with ads. Their platforms are designed to keep us online, pushing out content that will keep us engaged.…

The UK government is stuck treating the symptoms, not the root cause of online harms.

Nothing changes until we break the business model that drives hate and extremism; the harvesting of our data to maximise engagement and fuel advertising.

It's time to #BreakBigTech.

Sign and share our petition ⬇️

I’m imagining she’s 7 feet tall and had to bend down stick the eyes on.

I thought it had to be a typo! She must be enormous, it’s the only way 🤷‍♂️

Anyone who can stick eyes on a statue that accurately after drinking THREE LITRES of vodka and dropping Ecstasy deserves a feckin medal!!

😄

Florix Grabundae!

I picked up a nostalgia-driven quarterly subscription to the digital edition a year ago & haven’t missed a prog since - it’s brightened up every Wednesday.

Absolutely amazing to see it reappearing on newsstands in our biggest supermarkets! What a cultural institution 2000AD is! ❤️👽🤖

Rightwing narrative fuelling false belief UK public oppose net zero, study finds Reform, Tory and some media rhetoric runs contrary to poll showing far more voters for net zero than against it

Reform’s loud opposition to net zero is driven by “the success of populist messages around Brexit plus significant financial backing from the fossil fuel industry and climate sceptics”

Not science. Not national interest. Not public opinion. Just personal greed.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

100,000 trans people & allies fill central London for Trans Pride.

Mainstream media: nothing

Thousands of trans people & allies fill Wembley Arena for pro-trans gig with massive names like Sophie Ellis-Bextor & Sugarbabes.

Mainstream media: nothing.

This is what extreme media bias looks like.

Ah, I’m being sarcastic. Britain gets accused by right wingers of being unsafe and full of mistrust *because* of diversity. My comment is a joke, but the unsmiling face is staring straight at those people.

But how can Britain be so trusting when it’s so diverse??? 😐

Full interview: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Pentagon feud YouTube video by CBS News

The irony that Anthropic are desperately trying to allow the use of their technologies to protect democracy, only to find the biggest threat to democracy to be their own government is pretty chilling…

youtu.be/MPTNHrq_4LU?...

Tracking Efforts To Restrict Or Ban Teens from Social Media Across the Globe Several countries have passed—and many others are considering—restrictions or bans on teens accessing social media platforms.

Governments worldwide are moving to restrict youth access to social media — from Australia’s nationwide under-16 ban to fast-moving proposals in Europe, Asia, and the United States. Tech Policy Press is tracking these legislative efforts across continents and jurisdictions. 40 countries on the map:

GovTech Lab Ukraine selects winning innovation startups GovTech Lab Ukraine has chosen three startups to pilot digital solutions in the public sector in its first open innovation programme.

Interesting set of practical applications of AI in public administration…

“GovTech Lab Ukraine selects winning innovation startups - Smart Cities World”

My internet troll turned out to be an AI bot gone rogue — The Times and The Sunday Times Until last week, Scott Shambaugh was a private, almost anonymous, software developer from Denver, Colorado. Now the world knows him as the first person to be defamed by a malicious AI agent acting of ...

It’s about to rain shit all over the internet…

Did the centre just hold by 5 to 4??!!!

The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.

Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.

This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

Neurodivergent Music Network Membership Membership with NMN is free. About us: The Neurodivergent Music Network (NMN) is a cross-disciplinary hub for neurodivergent researchers to explore the intersection between music and neurodivergence...

I am very excited to introduce you to the Neurodivergent Music Network, a cross-disciplinary hub for neurodivergent researchers exploring the intersection between music and neurodivergence.

Our mission is to collectively establish Neurodivergent Music Studies as a distinct academic field.

Design and Applications of Positive Energy Districts: eBook - URENIO | Intelligent Cities – Smart Cities – Innovation Ecosystems A special issue at DESIGNS is published as an ebook, edited by Tony Castillo-Calzadilla and Carlos Quesada-Granja. This collection of articles explores the forefront of sustainable urbanism, where…

This is a great resource for city & neighbourhood leaders, and smart city practitioners:

“This collection of articles explores the forefront of sustainable urbanism, where city districts generate more renewable energy than they consume…”

The strategy is “diminish US power”. That should be patently obvious by now. The Trump administration isn’t carrying out an American strategy at all.

How cities are using AI in 2026 “We’re all in learning mode … and looking at it with a wary eye,” one mayor said about AI’s potential for municipal operations. Read more in this 2026 outlook.

So many of these “AI opportunities” can already be done with good service & process design, and data sharing. Hard to see how AI is suddenly going to overcome the bureaucratic inertia that stands in the way…

How cities are using AI in 2026

It might have been Antonio Gaudi.

Parking enforcement shifts towards behaviour, not tickets - Cities Today Cities across North America are shifting parking enforcement away from ticket volumes toward compliance-first strategies, according to a new survey of city, university and private-sector parking…

"Compliance is a behavioural goal, but many departments still rely on legacy KPIs built around enforcement activity rather than customer experience or voluntary adherence."

How many other municipal services and metrics is this true of?!

Chattanooga secures grant for quantum workforce development Chattanooga power and telecoms company EPB has announced a Quantum Computing Fellowship to provide training to equip participants to develop quantum solutions

I'm interested to discover what they determine "quantum-ready workforce" to actually mean.

"Chattanooga secures grant for quantum workforce development - Smart Cities World"

Candela P-12 completes record-breaking voyage - Marine Business Candela P-12 completes record-breaking voyage. The P-12 is the world's first serial-production electric hydrofoil ferry.

This is just very cool to see...

"Candela P-12 completes record-breaking voyage - Marine Business"

True. If, say, Uber decided to buy Tesla instead of doing licensing deals with Lucid & others, that would be a strong move.
I’m still confused about “augmenting” drivers though - the truly efficient model would be centralised drivers controlling vehicles remotely through complex traffic areas.

Healthy City Dashboard — City of Vancouver Open Data Portal View datasets from the City of Vancouver, BC, Canada. Download data in various formats, explore with charts and maps, and access via API.

A UK city official I once interviewed on the meaning of 'smart cities' said to me "a smart city is a city that knows the value of things". It's a comment that has always stuck with me, and so it's always fascinating to see what cities measure in order to gauge their progress & success...

#vancouver

Uber CEO outlines AV plans Uber expects to have robotaxis in 15 cities by the end of this year, but AVs will not replace all human drivers, the company’s CEO said.

“We’re more convinced than ever that AVs will unlock a multitrillion dollar opportunity for Uber".
“This is not the kind of a technology that is going to replace [human drivers]; it’s going to augment [them]".

Discuss... 😆