Dave Howcroft 🦔 in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Tommy Robinson is writing for Jerusalem Post, and that makes some people uncomfortable - opinion When journalism abandons the debate over ideas and focuses instead on policing who is permitted to speak, the search for truth quietly gives way to the enforcement of acceptable opinion. Tommy Robinson wears a UTK logo ("Unite The Kingdom") on his clothes as he is seen at a rally in solidarity with protesters in Iran on January 11, 2026 in London, England.

ByTOMMY ROBINSON MARCH 8, 2026 18:30

Robinson had previously tried to address “the Jewish Question” in a 2022 article which he deleted shortly afterwards. He divided the Jews into two types – acceptable ones and disreputable ones. He particularly had it in for the Anti-Defamation League – in his eyes a cesspit of Jewish liberalism and subversion internationally.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

They're platforming an ACTUAL NAZI NOW

I'm laughing to keep from screaming

The gentry, y'all.

I really think that some of you don't understand this country at all. Folks, 41% support is extremely LOW for a war led by this country. I ask you to right-size your expectations. This is a country that almost ALWAYS supports wars in the majority when they are launched.

In defense of "cross-training": I think part of the reason people enjoy my writing is because I grasped the concept of cadence early on. Writing has to sound good in your mind when you read it.

And I picked that skill up writing untold amounts of fanfiction as a middle schooler.

Screenshot of an online form where the surname “Lazić” is entered. An error message below says: “Surname may only contain letters and the following characters - ' ( ) @ / and cannot start with /”.

I thought we were over this.

things that drive me up a wall with AI getting shoved into everything:

right-clicking a word flagged for misspelling in the Outlook composer (and possibly other places, idk) no longer presents an option to add it to my dictionary.

I’m in my mid-thirties and have only discovered via invisalign that actually I don’t need to grind my molars against each other to chew. I can just gently massage my food with my molars and it ALSO gets chewed?????? somebody needs to study the ADHD of it all

What if you could automatically transcribe children's speech sounds from their first babbles to full sentences?

Screening for speech delays. Comparing how kids learn to talk across languages. Following how sounds evolve month by month.

We're building toward this with BabAR🧵 (sound on 🔊)

If I had a nickel for every time Franz Ferdinand was involved in the precursor events of a world war, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird it happened twice

Ah yes, because those conservative social preferences don't alienate trans people, immigrants & refugees, minorities, or anyone who doesn't fit their preconceived notion of what society is supposed to look like. Surely we're all in this together and *that* is what Labour is meant to stand for?

Crude oil prices, showing a very sharp increase in the last day, from around 65 to 101 dollars per barrel..

Oil prices wouldn't be all over the news today if more of our economy was powered by local, secure renewable energy.

This isn't an "energy crisis". It's a fossil fuel crisis.

44% of UK electricity came from renewables in 2025. More of that plus an electrified economy => no more oil shocks.

Same

I know I’ve got some Labour local gov’t types following me, so I want to say this clearly so that you can share it internally as appropriate: I will never again vote Labour while these policies, or Wes Streeting, are in place. I will not vote Labour at any level because of this.

I start my last-ever course today, MSc course on Natural Language Generation. My last lecture (on NLG evaluation) will be on 20 April. Hard to believe...

Just fascinating to see Blair, a man whose reputation was ruined by the Iraq war, advocate joining a war that is exponentially stupider and more chaotic. How is it possible to learn nothing from the worst mistake of your life?

Portrait of Lise Meitner taken in 1928. She is smoking a cigarette and looking impatient to get back to her experiments.

Last week, I mentioned this in passing in a workshop:

In 1938 Enrico Fermi won a Nobel Prize for discovering two new elements of the periodic table.

Lise Meitner shortly showed that Fermi was mistaken and instead had produced known lighter elements by fission.

She did not win a Nobel prize.

In fairness, people were really confused about fictional characters in early novels! It does seem like there’s a parallel there.

i have come to believe that Nature publishing any non-research articles (opinion/career/...) is a net loss for scientific discourse. jury is still out on research articles.

It increasingly seems they are preparing to use restructuring as a way to force compulsory redundancies, and I hope our political leaders and institutions like @johnswinney.bsky.social & @parliament.scot and news orgs like @heraldscotland.bsky.social & @scotnational.bsky.social are paying attention

Extremely disappointing to hear how @uniofaberdeen.bsky.social senior management remain intransigent on actually resolving disputes with @ucu.org.uk and adhering to the Fair Work policy as they try to force through changes on an unreasonably short timescale without involving staff properly

Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? No. No it can't. Come on, now.

New post: Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? (No. No it can't. Come on, now.)

davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...

My wife told me that people not consuming a consistent diet of literature is why they struggle with empathy & putting themselves in the shoes of others & now I see it in everything.

Nothing surprising about this guy beating his chest & proudly proclaiming that he doesn’t read though.

No shit man.

Turns out using your credit card to pay for privacy leaves a trail

Here's the thing about using AI for lit reviews ... If you've actually read the scholarship, writing the lit review yourself isn't that taxing. But what's gonna happen is folks will use AI to save themselves having to *read* the scholarship, which will then make the rest of their article trash.

We are living in the dystopian future we were warned about

In case you're not aware, Substack as a platform profits from white nationalism and the CEO has refused to condemn racist content promoted on their platform. There are alternatives like Ghost available if you don't want to support their network.

Given that we work in a discipline where truth is often a matter of the questions we ask of data, or a research design that requires justification and judgement, I wonder if we can ever outsource this sort of assessment.

remembering when I used to think it was unrealistic that cartoonish rich people in stories would do shit like "hug their money protectively while the building is falling around them rather than try to flee"

Life is hard enough just keeping up with the day-to-day while dealing with various stressors that pop up. Then you look up from your own life and see authoritarianism back home (USA), war in the Middle East, and transphobia everywhere and you wonder what the point is when people do such awful things