one thing I keep experiencing at the moment is a kind of wishful-thinking "this is shit" discourse, you hear it about AI and you hear it about DJT etc, and it's often so weak it makes me react with "no it WILL kill off all human culture" or "he WILL get away with all of this"
or at least, every time I have even the mildest discomfort
"I don't want to die now, I've got a headache!"
a line I think about almost every day
Local Massachusetts weekly says it's confirmed that the Pentagon was relying on Claude for strike targeting, which is how they came to bomb a girls' school.
thisweekinworcester.com/exclusive-ai...
does look like the neighbours' party walls held up alright, which is at least something
Part of the Union Street facade has collapsed into the street.
📷 Glasgow by drone
“We want to be involved in the process of choosing the person who is going to lead Iran into the future, so we don’t have to go back every five years and do this again and again,” Trump told Reuters in a telephone interview on Thursday.
Insane.
one of the very first concrete frame buildings anywhere, iirc?
'Markwayne'
‘Iran’s aim now seems to be not to secure immediate victory but to raise the cost of the war to prohibitive levels. It sees the conflict as existential. If regime change is the declared objective, then compromise is not an option.’
@eskandarsadeghi.bsky.social:
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...
big Bertie Russell in 1932… something tells me this problem of idleness that AI is bringing on is simply not going to be addressed
A little reported fact is that the Iranian frigate destroyed 2000 miles from the combat zone was carrying ZERO AMMUNITION (a condition of the exercise it was invited to participate in).
The ship was, by any definition, defenceless.
Much like the 80+ sailors left to drown.
Infamy.
I knew I had seen a similar thing somewhere before
Labour is a far right party
I have a horrible feeling that within a few years the world will get to experience what would have happened if you-know-who had won WWII
well there's a surprise
You'd think there has to be more to this quote, i.e. the method of choosing is at issue, but it does sound like "we're going to kill every single person who comes to the top" which admittedly has been their high-tech murder policy for quite a while now
it's waddling awkwardly and making fart noises with its mouth
what is becoming clear is that the means are the ends. The weapons aren't being used in pursuit of anything; Hegseth's goal is to be using the weapons, a far more deliverable objective than 'regime change'.
‘Starmer seems palpably and sincerely furious that he was lied to, but he has yet to explain why he acceded to a process that took as read Mandelson’s honesty and good character.’
James Butler (@piercepenniless.bsky.social) on Mandelson’s fall.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
This often turns out to be, um, a way of saying something else
"mr blobby undertaking a psychogeographic drift through the liminal spaces of east london" will forever remain my most popular twitter post
I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.
My mind has been returning to this video all weekend
“We thought we were living in a politically neutral slave state.”
If I ran a practice and received a text message like this from a part I I think I might just drop dead on the spot
“ As Trump used to look for depressed properties to scavenge, now the neocons inhabit the decaying hulk of Trumpism.” @lioneltrolling.bsky.social captures the extraordinary apathy that seems to be driving this war open.substack.com/pub/johnganz...
Netanyahu says the difference between Israel & Iran is that Iran targets civilians & Israel doesn't
A reminder that Netanyahu is wanted for war crimes that include directing attacks against civilians & extermination or murder as a crime against humanity
like, you think, ahhh this is war crimes tribunal stuff, like all that was said about Gaza, but then who on earth will be administering this hypothetical justice
as you witness this kind of thing unfolding, you wonder "they can't possibly get away with this, can they" and maybe it will become clear eventually that they really were as stupid as they seemed but when they're bombing away and crowing about it, it's hard to understand
One might almost think that turning other countries into ungovernable failed states was the *point* of American foreign policy.
