Rob Miller

The question YouTube video by Richard Dawson - Topic

The perfect visual accompaniment to this song: youtu.be/7xs_VlWAmJE

Britain Lost 14,000 Third Places. They Were Called Pubs. Is Your Local Next? How private equity reshaped the local and the postcode tool that shows the pubs most at risk.

This is quite astonishing. Can’t pretend I understand it all, and am not sure I 100% agree with conclusions, but a social studies academic analyses pub closures in a totally different way from anyone else ever has and comes up with some extraordinary insights. laurenleek.substack.com/p/britain-lo...

It’s how emojis work under the hood – they’re compound symbols, where colour and gender and other variants are made by combining different emoji: emojipedia.org/emoji-zwj-se...

I find this so common in critiques of LLMs from professionals in non-tech domains; as if "an LLM can do X" can only mean "you can one-shot this in ChatGPT with a vague prompt", and any scaffolding you put around the LLM is somehow cheating. (cf. @ed3d.net's recent "can an LLM index a book" posts)

Honestly the collective national level of disdain for Brits living in Dubai on all my social media platforms today really is bringing the UK together as one in a way that's hard to achieve in the modern era.

And for example, DuPont had safety ingrained in the culture since the very beginning of their foundation. DuPont started as a gunpowder company and gun powder companies, they have the problem that they have lots of explosions. And the way that the founder managed this risk was that he had two principles. The first one was that he the CEO lived with his family inside the premises of the company, which means that if there was an explosion, there would be a chance that he would be affected. Number two, he had the principle that every time that a new machine was installed in the plant, one of the directors had to operate for the first day so that if the machine was unsafe. Then the director will be the first one suffering from it. This is great because it's a perfect incentive to keep things safe.

I always love this story, about the DuPont gunpowder factory's culture of safety, from Luca Dellanna. 1. Make the factory director live in the factory, so they're personally invested in its safety; 2. Make someone from management the first person to operate every new bit of machinery

Meteorological (mists, clouds, wind, rain, storm, tempest, smoke, darkness, shadows, gloom). Topographical (impenetrable forests, inaccessible mountains, chasms, gorges, deserts, blasted heaths, icefields, the boundless ocean). Architectural (towers, prisons, castles covered in gargoyles and crenellations, abbeys and priories, tombs, crypts, dungeons, ruins, graveyards, mazes, secret passages, locked doors). Material (masks, veils, disguises, billowing curtains, suits of armour, tapestries). Textual (riddles, rumours, folklore, unreadable manuscripts and inscriptions, ellipses, broken texts, fragments, clotted language, polysyllabism, obscure dialect, inserted narratives, stories-within-stories). Spiritual (religious mystery, allegory and symbolism, Roman Catholic ritual, mysticism, freemasonry, magic and the occult, Satanism, witchcraft, summonings, damnation). Psychological (dreams, visions, hallucinations, drugs, sleep-walking, madness, split personalities, mistaken identities, doubles, derangement, ghostly presences, forgetfulness, death, hauntings).

thinking about Nick Groom's suggested "seven types of obscurity" in Gothic novels, forming a handy "is it goth" checklist lmao

I think this is the gold standard for "how is AI going to affect this industry?" analysis; the "AI as Normal Technology" guys taking a look at law roblog.co.uk/2026/02/ai-l...

An interesting use of LLMs in the newsroom: the New York Times' tool for tracking right-wing sentiment in the (awfully named) "manosphere" roblog.co.uk/2026/02/new-...

One of my favourite YouTube channels at the moment: saintcavish’s thoughtful and beautiful films about Chinese cooking roblog.co.uk/2026/02/sain...

I enjoyed this Elizabeth Goodspeed piece about the growing prevalence of "analogue" aesthetics and craft-fixation in creative work: roblog.co.uk/2026/02/faki...

"everyone has to get back to the office because the important thing about business is human interaction" is dying, but "white collar jobs will be replaced by AI agents within 18 months" cannot yet be born; in this interregnum a variety of morbid symptoms appear.

There's a labeller that does this! It's great bsky.app/profile/xblo...

We did a rewatch of all the StudioCanal-restored Ealings at the back end of last year and, while they're all brilliant, this remains my favourite I think. It also made me go out and get Alexander Mackendrick's fascinating book "On Film-Making"

Richard Thompson: Calvary Cross live YouTube video by Liam Davies

One of my favourite live performances and an all-time great guitar solo: Richard Thompson's The Calvary Cross, 1975. Not a note wasted www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8i6...

The mundanity of excellence (or why Olympians probably don't actually work harder than you): roblog.co.uk/2026/02/mund...

Timeline break: Here's the Dolmio Family doing the "funny how" scene from Goodfellas.

exactly. this is not difficult.

as.ft.com/r/58ed1b23-d...

DOCTOR: I told him he needed to get out to a show, that was how he would cure his depression.

CHOTINER: So you learned this technique in school?

DR: No, not— listen it was good advice. Pagliacci was in town.

C: Right. Is it standard to give advice before learning a patient’s name?

DR: Now look

Sarcasm that Spinotti seems to recognise about 0.05% of

You and I are two journalists talking, essentially. Yeah. So, I mean, to me, the experience was about, yes, being a reporter—being a cinematographer in a documentary, and doing my best to make Melania look visually beautiful with the lighting. One thing reporters try to do is to spotlight ideas or news stories, and what you’re trying to do is spotlight her face and its beauty. I do see a real similarity there. Yeah. We were trying to do the best we could. Again, as I told you, I was the guy with a camera, with a couple of assistants in the Trumps’ apartment when they came back to the White House at night. So there’s an interview with Melania at that point, and we organized the lights in the best possible way. It’s important to make them look as good as possible, too. That’s part of your job, or our job.

You told the Times that Brett “made some mistakes.” Has he told you that he made mistakes? No. No. No. Isaac, no. All I’m saying is that I worked with him twelve hours, fifteen hours, a day, and then everybody went their own way. Our age difference is wide. I could be his father. I read that Roman Polanski is a father figure to him. So that role might already be filled. There are a lot of people who feel affection for Brett. Yeah, yeah. Because he’s a good kid. [In 2007’s Paris-based “Rush Hour 3,” Ratner gave a cameo to Polanski, who had fled to France after being accused of anally and vaginally raping a thirteen-year-old. He was later accused of sexually assaulting other teen-agers, which he denies. In the cameo, Polanski has a comic scene where he prepares to do an anal-cavity search of Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.]

Are you going to do “Heat 2”? No, I’m not. I think I probably interrupted my collaboration with Michael Mann. Why? I don’t know. It’s one of those things. I did five movies with Michael, and sometimes with these things, for some reason, you get interrupted. The last one I did was with the actor in Chicago. “Public Enemies”? “Public Enemies.” Yes, that’s right. It would be too complex to explain to you now. If you’re not doing “Heat 2,” there’s maybe room for “Melania 2” at some point, with more focus on her achievements. Yeah, we’ll see about that.

Isaac Chotiner's interview with "Melania" cinematographer Dante Spinotti is one of the most sarcastic things I've ever read, I love it

I love these so much

Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): an incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy Gather round the fire, everyone, and let me tell you a story. It has everything you could want in a Christmas blockbuster: superheroes and villains, a car crash, children singing, a mystery to solv…

The playground memetics also reminds me of loreandordure.com/2025/12/16/j...

I Am The Walrus (Remastered 2009) YouTube video by The Beatles - Topic

Great (if unexpectedly harrowing) post! I never realised the "umpa umpa stick it up your jumper" phrase was from music hall, but I guess that means it's yet another music hall reference in a Beatles song (it features at the end of I am the Walrus): www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws5k...

The Uncomfortable Truths About Immigration On highbrow pro-immigration misinformation & what the elites don’t want you to know

This is a very good, measured piece on why and immigration "liberals" often (but shouldn't) exaggerate/overegg the evidence on the positive impacts of immigration.

(ignore the title)

alexanderkustov.substack.com/p/the-uncomf...

People "who are disgusted with how 'woke' the police have become", but *who already are the police*. Officers who think "it's a shame what happened to our mates at Charing Cross, you can't say anything these days, if only I could give these scum a good kicking they wouldn't nick phones" etc.

The decisions of dictators Autocrats, trapped by the dynamics of power, often make awful decisions. Why is that?

There was a great paper written a couple of years ago about the worsening quality of the advice received by dictators as their rule gets more precarious, and the dynamics that lead to it: roblog.co.uk/2023/04/dict...

Thinking Of You (feat. Lisa Tomlins) YouTube video by Lord Echo - Topic

Was reminded of Lord Echo + Lisa Tomlins joyous Kiwi reggae cover of Sister Sledge's "Thinking of You" this morning: youtu.be/coHut-f2olw

I finished it a couple of weeks ago. I had to set aside some time on a quiet Saturday morning to read the last couple of chapters, both because I didn't want it to end and because I had a sense of how I might feel when it did. "Whimsical and devastating" is exactly right – thank you for it.

Inside ‘Operation Absolute Resolve,’ the U.S. Effort to Capture Maduro

The gushing tone of US articles about military operations is nauseating. Nerds fawning over jocks, coopting the language of "elite units", "MH-47 helicopters", regimental nicknames and then casually dropping in "oh and 40 Venezuelan civilians died too" www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/u...