"This is the publicly endorsed worldview of a company that is rapidly becoming load-bearing infrastructure for the federal government’s surveillance and enforcement apparatus, and it contains arguments that would be at home in a white nationalist pamphlet."
The First WORLD FENCING LEAGUE is happening April 25th!!! I'M GEEKING!!!
Japanese engineers developed this "Sword Tip Visualisation" tracking technology specifically for this event that will make it so much easier for the average person to see what's going on!
I MUST WATCH THIS ENTIRE TOURNAMENT
Me, appearing from a gargantuan cloud of smoke: Stay in, get high and watch anime? Sounds like pretty good advice man
Palantir... where have a heard that before. Hey, is that the same spy-tech company the UK Gov gave a £300mil NHS England contract and a £240mil Ministry of Defence contract?
You know how you rehearse a perfectly lucid and erudite conversation in your head, and then it happens in reality and you go, "Good morning! CA BLH LEB SPA FA TURD CA? It's just that..." And you have to mime the last bit because it's all you have left? Yeah. That.
Of course. It's their ball and only they are allowed to play with it
Pink Floyd at Pompeii - MCMLXXII (2025 Mix) on Qobuz
Soooo fkn good 🤩
Pink Floyd at Pompeii - MCMLXXII (2025 Mix)
by Pink Floyd
on Qobuz
open.qobuz.com/album/gyoh6k...
The sun setting over the Severn Estuary as seen from the top of Uley Bury hill fort. I took this photo in September, 2021, on the most perfect windless evening, feeling euphoric having finished the edits on my debut novel, Villager. The whole walk felt like I'd temporarily stepped inside a Kit Williams painting, which was apt since for the last several decades he has lived not far from here, and the landscape was a prime inspiration for his masterpiece Masquerade. I still associate this scene with Villager, which, although it's inspired by a more rugged landscape a couple of hours south west of here, it has some very Villager elements. If you are new to my writing and would like to read an excerpt from the book (one of the sillier, easier-to-read parts of it) you'll find one in the link. I promise it's not shit.
Almost certainly the best photo I will ever take from an Iron Age hillfort of the sun setting over an estuary as summer segues majestically into autumn.
www.tom-cox.com/the-village-...
This 1918 painting by Maruta Shogo, titled Oshiroibana (Four-o’clock Flower), is a classic expression of bijin-ga, the genre of Japanese art dedicated to the portrayal of beautiful women. The composition features two women in a garden of blooming four-o'clocks; one kneels to tend to the flowers while the other stands gracefully nearby, holding a traditional fan. Both figures are dressed in elegant kimono—one in a bold blue and white starburst pattern and the other in a sophisticated dark pinstripe with white floral accents—capturing a moment of quiet, feminine leisure in the late Meiji or early Taisho period.
"Oshiroibana" (translated as Four-o'clock Flower) and was created in 1918 by the Japanese artist Maruta Shogo (1880–1961).
The piece is a classic example of Bijin-ga, a genre of Japanese art that focuses on portraying beautiful women.
Well...
X screenshot British Intel @TheBritishIntel • 8h Greggs has rolled out a Chicken Sausage Roll specifically to suit one particular community.* Traditional pork sausage rolls are clearly too much for some these days. This isn't about giving people more choice - it's about quietly erasing a classic British food to keep one group happy. Our culture is being dismantled one product at a time. ("Our culture is being dismantled" has been underlined in red by some twonk. Not me.)
If sausage rolls are the extent of your culture, it deserves to be dismantled
America has more legal checks and balances in place for a single building than it does for... Everything else the President has ever done, including an illegal war
Whale oil beef hooked
Meta: "We will not allow trial lawyers to profit from our platforms while simultaneously claiming they are harmful."
What a time to be alive
I will be abundantly clear for legal reasons that it is illegal to throw a Molotov cocktail at anyone, as it is morally objectionable to do so. I explicitly and fundamentally object to the recent acts of violence against Sam Altman. It is also morally repugnant for Sam Altman to somehow suggest that the careful, thoughtful, determined, and eagerly fair work of Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz is in any way responsible for these acts of violence. Doing so is a deliberate attempt to chill the air around criticism of AI and its associated companies. Altman has since walked back the comments, claiming he “wishes he hadn’t used” a non-specific amount of the following words: A lot of the criticism of our industry comes from sincere concern about the incredibly high stakes of this technology. This is quite valid, and we welcome good-faith criticism and debate. I empathize with anti-technology sentiments and clearly technology isn’t always good for everyone. But overall, I believe technological progress can make the future unbelievably good, for your family and mine. While we have that debate, we should de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics and try to have fewer explosions in fewer homes, figuratively and literally. These words remain on his blog, which suggests that Altman doesn’t regret them enough to remove them. I do, however, agree with Mr. Altman that the rhetoric around AI does need to change. Both he and Mr. Amodei need to immediately stop overstating the capabilities of Large Language Models. Mr. Altman and Mr. Amodei should not discuss being “scared” of their models, or being “uncomfortable” that men such as they are in control unless they wish to shut down their services, or that they “don’t know if models are conscious.” They should immediately stop misleading people through company documentation that models are “blackmailing” people or, as Anthropic did in its Mythos system card, suggest a model has “broken containment and sent a message” when it A) was…
They must stop discussing threats to jobs without actual meaningful data that is significantly more sound than “jobs that might be affected some day but for now we’ve got a chatbot.” Mr. Amodei should immediately cease any and all discussions of AI potentially or otherwise eliminating 50% of white collar jobs, as Mr. Altman should cease predicting when Superintelligence might arrive, as Mr. Amodei should actively reject and denounce any suggestions of AI “creating a white collar bloodbath.” Those that defend AI labs will claim that these are “difficult conversations that need to be had,” when in actuality they engage in dangerous and frightening rhetoric as a means of boosting a company’s valuation and garnering attention. If either of these men truly believed these things were true, they would do something about it other than saying “you should be scared of us and the things we’re making, and I’m the only one brave enough to say anything.” These conversations are also nonsensical and misleading when you compare them to what Large Language Models can do, and this rhetoric is a blatant attempt to scare people into paying for software today based on what it absolutely cannot and will not do in the future. It is an attempt to obfuscate the actual efficacy of a technology as a means of deceiving investors, the media and the general public. Both Altman and Amodei engage in the language of AI doomerism as a means of generating attention, revenue and investment capital, actively selling their software and future investment potential based on their ownership of a technology that they say (disingenuously) is potentially going to take everybody’s jobs. Based on reports from his Instagram, the man who threw the molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house was at least partially inspired by If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, a doomer porn fantasy written by a pair of overly-verbose dunces spreading fearful language about the power of AI, inspired by the fearmongering of Altman…
I need to be clear that this act of violence is not something I endorse in any way. I also need to be clear that people feel like they’re being fucking tortured every time they load social media. Their money doesn’t go as far. Every time they read something it’s a story about ICE patrols or a near-nuclear war in Iran, or that gas is more expensive, or that there’s worrying things happening in private credit. Nobody can afford a house and layoffs are constant. One group, however, appears to exist in an alternative world where anything they want is possible. They can raise as much money as they want. They can build as big a building as they want anywhere in the world. Everything they do is taken so seriously that the government will call a meeting about it. Every single media outlet talks about everything they do. Your boss forces you to use it. Every piece of software forces you to at least acknowledge that they use it too. Everyone is talking about it with complete certainty despite it not being completely clear why. And these companies are, in no uncertain terms, coming for your job. That’s what they want to do. They all say it. They use deceptively-worded studies that talk about “AI-exposed” careers to scare and mislead people into believing LLMs are coming for their jobs, all while spreading vague proclamations about how said job loss is imminent but also always 12 months away. Altman even says that jobs that will vanish weren’t real work to begin with, much as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati said that some creative jobs shouldn’t have existed in the first place. These people who sell a product with no benefit comparable on any level to its ruinous, trillion-dollar cost are able to get anything they want at a time when those who work hard are given a kick in the fucking teeth, sneered at for not “using AI” that doesn’t actually seem to make their lives easier, and then told that their labor doesn’t constitute “real work.” At a time when nobody living a nor…
Here's the conclusion of my free newsletter going out tomorrow, on the dangerous rhetoric spread by Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis.
wheresyoured.at
Hobbyless behaviour
Yeah, I have to say “spend decades screaming allegations of treason at your rivals, then absent-mindedly hand over decision-making to foreign tech companies, because you are basically groupies for the rich and powerful awestruck with admiration” would be exactly on-brand.
“British political class spends 50 years selling everything country owns to the super-wealthy, and then - panicking, because they realise they no longer have the state capacity to do anything the public likes or wants - outsource governance to Silicon Valley” Yes, I can believe that is happening.
Keir Starmer make one good decision impossible challenge speedrun
For those of us who never used all of our Bluesky invite codes before they went away, they should be turned into uninvite codes where we can delete accounts of our choice
"Being middle-aged is worse than being old."
Interview full of great quotes:
"...being middle aged is much worse than being old..." #PetShopBoys
"We went through the late 80s totally undefined. That word sounds quite liberating, doesn’t it? Now everything is defined completely. In fact it’s disapproved of, not being defined."
Fun fact! There's a whole community dedicated to jailbreaking and modding kindles. You don't need to settle for this.
kindlemodding.org
this goes hard as fuck
Communist party recruitment video bsky.app/profile/bran...
It didn't seem hyperbolic at the time, tbh fam
Picture of Marjane Satrapi alongside a quote from her. The quote reads: The world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don't know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same... - Marjane Satrapi, Iranian-French graphic novelist
Thinking about this quote from Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi again.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
These are the words of the president of the United States, today.
The president speaks genocide. And so we too must speak. Not only about crimes, but about their legal punishment.
snyder.substack.com/p/the-presid...
Once a year every year I get ALL of the car insurance comparison site emails for his shitty 2019 Nissan Infiniti QX50
