Brian Cant and Floella Benjamin smile out from the cover of an album: Songs from BBC TV's Play School and Play Away
At 11am on 21 April 1964, Play School made its debut, and became the first programme ever broadcast on BBC2
Cat Distribution System strikes again
💖 Hope this Quokka brings ya
joy 🌿 Happy Everything 💚🤎
RanV @ranv.bsky.social • 1h → Replied to RanV Besides, much (not all but certainly most) of the antisemitism would fade away if the state of Israel stopped existing, or at the very least stopped committing atrocities and war crimes against its neighbouring populations.
Little-known fact: the Holocaust, the blood libels, the pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition, Clifford’s Tower and the Dreyfus Affair were all perpetrated by time travelers who had come from the future where they had been radicalised by seeing the construction of the state of Israel.
When the Nazis rounded up the Jews in Vienna they took the Jews' door keys as they were taken into the assembly camps.
bsky.app/profile/adri...
If you are 'anti-Zionist' then you must be pro-Jewish settlement in Europe, in North America, in Australia and NZ, etc, and should be in favour of the return of stolen Jewish lands and homes across Europe.
If you're not in favour of Jews living *anywhere* then indeed you are just an antisemite.
We lived all over Europe! In countries that often put up only token effort to stop the Nazis murdering their Jewish populations. And which to this day have mostly done fuck-all about trying to return Jewish lands to the families of those who were murdered.
I had a brilliant conversation about this recently with Mungi Tutu, the granddaughter of Desmond Tutu. She said: when non-Jewish Europeans said "a land without a people for a people without a land" about Palestine, that was racist both toward Palestinians and toward Jews. Jews had land!
His question is: do you think anything has really changed since the Holocaust? Are you sure that your friends & neighbours wouldn’t turn on you just like they did then? If it’s still the same, then the existence of Israel is still just as essential and you should move here.
And as I’ve said before, if you disagree with the project of the state of Israel then surely you must be very positive about Jewish people who are making our lives outside Israel.
Netanyahu is deliberately stress-testing that hypothesis and proving it false. Antisemitism does his work for him.
It is the logic of the Holocaust. You have no other options, everyone but Jews hates Jews. You might not like us, but we’re the only ones who are really interested in protecting you. You’re in an extreme situation that demands extreme measures.
One of the things I most resent about this is that I know it to be a deliberate strategy by Netanyahu, he does not want Jewish people to feel safe living outside Israel. And it’s working, global antisemitism is rising. The antisemites are making his point for him.
This depends on the airport. City airport: no point arriving more than 90 mins before the flight. Mexico City: I literally always book the hotel at the airport and get there six hours before the flight.
I would in essence vote for any political party that made this announcement and rule a legal requirement on all UK public transport.
Amtrak is clearly not as good as British railways except for one important respect which is that they just announced firmly that if you are making a call or watching a TikTok video on your phone you MUST BE WEARING HEADPHONES.
hah, yes I tend to translate it as "fish filling", as it's clearly the stuffing part from the centre that we eat
fascinating! I have only used the 'make me a podcast' function which my ADHD-adjacent brain finds very good for doing a gear-shift into working on something new
😂😱
I wrote today about the big thing I think any creative person needs to bear in mind if trying to use AI. it’s not even the errors or the terrible writing style. it’s the temptation to make your work more average:
substack.com/@naomialderm...
this is incredible news. the doctors' joke is: if someone tells you they have pancreatic cancer, ask if they have any green bananas you can take off their hands.
it's an obscenely fast killer and for people to get six extra years is a miracle of science.
yes. you have to actually read the paper. you can say to the AI "which page is this on, what is the context?" to make that process quicker. but yes, it has to go through your actual brain.
it's more like a search engine in that sense. a good, deep search engine that you can give detailed instructions to in natural language. but yes, it is not good at text generation and I think it's actually getting somewhat worse. and it clearly doesn't obey very clearly stated guardrails there.
I would say that: when doing research, if you tell it that it must provide an academic-level reference and link for every claim, it will supply references and links and then you can check them yourself. For me, that's a massive time-saver. *Most* of them are right, but you do have to check each one.
I guess I share this because I am someone who thinks there are some interesting uses for AI, and therefore it is really really important for me to also say the massive problems. It fabricated claims about my life without noting it had done so and despite system instructions never to do that.
I do this to keep an eye on where the technology is. thus far, my assessment remains: it is absolutely not writing for me in any capacity.
occasionally I like to try to see what happens if I get AI to "write something for me".
today I gave Claude Opus 4.7 detailed notes of my entire argument, plus 12 pieces of mine to base the voice on.
it instantly fabricated a bunch of shit about me that would be super-damaging if I published it.
they have Joanie and Haley, Gordon & Donna's daughters. they can do it.
sometimes, it is simply time to begin to watch Halt and Catch Fire again from the start
what I wouldn't give for:
Season 5: social media
Season 6: AI
It's really the only conversation I'm interested in. I'm not interested by "never use this for anything" (a perfectly respectable decision, but if you don't use it for anything, you probably don't know what it's bad or good at) and I'm not interested by "this is going to change EVERYTHING".
And you can burn all of your creatives out by getting them to do version after version after version, even though we know that it definitely won't work in A, B, C, and D way, and that we should be focusing on N and T.
