There are currently 6 permanent full time history jobs in the whole UK. 500+ PhDs being produced a year - not all of whom will want to pursue an academic year but likely most, and of course years will stack up onto each other. What a sector.
Gil Duran tweet: TLDR: Fascism in response to Palantir's long fascists screed on X.
"Your Account is Suspended" Message on X
The CEO of Palantir posted a fascist manifesto on X.
I pointed out that it was fascist—which resulted in a permanent suspension from X (my second time!).
So, when you hear the tweeters complaining that BlueSky is intolerant, remember why many of us came here in the first place.
I asked ChatGPT who I am. It said I'm Chris Chambers.
I am not Prof. Chris Chambers, and I didn't reveal myself as Chris Chambers (or anyone else) in 2015...
I can see the logic in thinking that we're the same person, since we agree on a lot of things, but it's not true! And it gets worse...
Sorry for the delay; my bank now prohibits international PayPal payments. I had a family member send it today.
This is the crux of it.
I spent much of today fixing something a collaborator vibecoded. It did something that could never work, and repeated that code 4 times in slightly different ways, so I had to hunt them all down, figure out what they meant to do, and redirect them to a working function.
me with the time machine, to my 1996 self:
the year is 2026. the Pope is the only world leader you respect. you believe unironically that the cultural mores and sexual behavior of San Francisco are destroying America. computers were a mistake
The older I get, the more that "What Jesus blatantly fails to appreciate is that it's the meek who are the problem" seems like the best, most quotable line in 'The Life of Brian'.
That’s how you know the teaching they want to do is actually *marketing*.
Yeah, when people tell me “we need to teach them how to use chatbots” I ask them what precisely is the skill involved that isn’t critical thinking? The chat interface is *specifically* designed for fluency. Imagine if we had invented courses to teach using touchscreens when they came out.
"If you can't solve the smallest task in someone's life, why would they ever trust you to solve the biggest one?"
Mamdani's revival of early 20th century "sewer socialism" here is the inverse of Guiliani's "broken windows" approach.
Starting small to do big things, but this time, they're good.
This just got a revise and resubmit decision at AMPPS, so there will be a new version soon!
Lauren continues to write fabulous papers a lot this. This was the other week arxiv.org/abs/2603.29134
In March 2026, an Anthropic employee released the source code of Claude Code, a wrapper around their large language model that is widely used to generate code in programming tasks. Its thousands of lines of Typescript code contained many hopeful prompts and incantations to shape Claude’s behaviour. Here are some examples: “Report outcomes faithfully”; “Never characterize incomplete or broken work as done”; “Be careful not to introduce security vulnerabilities” (prompts.ts in Anthropic 2026). There is more than a passing resemblance here to the Azande witch-doctor apprentice who, while stirring the medicine, utters: “You medicine which I am cooking, mind you always speak the truth to me. Do not let anyone injure me with his witchcraft, but let me recognize all witches. … Let me be expert at the witch-doctor’s craft so that people will give me many spears on account of my magic.” (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 93). In the case of Claude, the incantations appeared insufficient: analysis of the codebase, which according to a company executive was “pretty much 100% written by Claude Code”, revealed severe security vulnerabilities (Townsend 2026).
I was supposed to finish this March 31 and then the #Claude Code leak happened, handing me the perfect opening example
Some of it has been in the works for longer: it's also a version of (part of) my #DHd2025 keynote titled "What makes LLMs so irresistible?"
Read it here: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
A very stocky Exmoor Horn ram.
Happy 8th anniversary to the tweet that changed us forever. Look at this absolute unit.
Trying to send something over via Paypal, but my bank locked my account when I tried :( Don't know if this is a general problem, but hopefully they resolve it soon.
Great essay; thanks!
you should read my article, in which I explain why westerners are obsessed with a completely fictional idea of 'honor culture,' where it came from, and then repeatedly dunked on pete hegseth
The best song ever written:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuQb...
We have a new PhD position at the University of Zurich to work on visual working memory. For more info see here:
www.psychology.uzh.ch/en/areas/nec...
Talking to some undergrads tomorrow about the why no one actually pays us to type model.fit() and asked them ahead of time to submit answers to a "trivially easy" data problem
Fun to see the results come it, wild to know how many business run with a not dissimilar fog of war
the most realistic thing in Project Hail Mary: in a karaoke party with an international team of scientists and engineers, someone would *definitely* sing Winds of Change
leaving this enabled. my code sucks shit, you saps
What the average person thinks HR is supposed to do for them at a job
is what unions are actually for.
What a GREAT MOMENT — new Paris Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire @egregoire.bsky.social arrives via the Rivoli cycle path to Paris City Hall, embraces his predecessor Anne Hidalgo @annehidalgo.bsky.social while @carlosmorenofr.bsky.social, who just sent me this special video, looks on.
Inspiring.
Exactly. Apparently a spokesperson said "Yes, but they must prove they are a citizen". But if you're not letting them in because they're a dual national without a passport, then you *know* they're a dual national?
I need someone to explain to me---very slowly---how if you *know* they're dual nationals...so you don't let them in...why...you won't let them in? When a foreign national *would* be let in on the same passport? This is insanity.
An absolutely excruciating moment at the Georgia Supreme Court this week.
Justice Peterson pressed state attorney Deborah Leslie over her citations to cases that apparently don’t exist.
Three panel comic. Panel 1: young man in a hoodie looking morose and sitting on a swing set. He says “she’s breaking up with me…” Panel 2: next to him is a glyptodon, an early ancestor of armadillos. With his head in his hands, the young man says “what do I do glyptodon?” Panel 3: the glyptodon says “I’m like an early ancestor of armadillos. The young man angrily replies, “are you even listening man?”
