Wonderul. The Izzard scene I love is your animals watching you as you put your Ikea bookshelves together.
Dog: *panting* I don't know what you're doing, & I don't know why you're doing it, but you're wonderful & I love you.
Cat: *waits till you're done* Well, I wouldn't have done it that way...
‘BEST COPY AVAILABLE’
First frame on microfilm. Expecting next to read: ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’.
- AI training isn’t ‘learning’ and shouldn’t be treated as such
The House of Lords has been absolutely consistent on this, and they are totally right. Will the government listen?
/end
They destroy the argument that big tech should be given the country’s creative output for free, and they lay out the case for maintaining and even strengthening existing copyright law to protect creatives from exploitation.
2/5
The House of Lords Digital & Communications Committee just published their report on AI, copyright & the creative industries, and their conclusions could not be clearer.
🧵 1/5
My mother (left school at 16 with a couple of O-levels) started working with McGill in palliative care in her mid-50s, sat on the board of governors and was given an hon doc for her work: lifelong learning is a wonderful thing.
I'm not a huge fan myself, but this is indeed glorious. (And I'm rivetted by the chairs, which to my uneducated eyes look exactly like Charles Rennie Mackintosh's examples.)
A Frank Lloyd Wright house restored. Dazzling photographs: news.artnet.com/art-world/fr...
Press Association comment from Quakers in Britain This evening, for the second time in a year, the Metropolitan Police raided a Quaker Meeting House and arrested a number of young nonviolent activists who were meeting there on the grounds that they were conspiring to commit a criminal act. The room in Westminster Quaker Meeting House was let to Take Back Power to hold nonviolent direct action training. Quakers support the principle of nonviolent direct action, which aims to protest without harming people. Oliver Robertson, head of witness and worship for Quakers in Britain, said: “For Quakers, faith and action are inseparable. Peaceful protest, prayer and nonviolent action are integral parts of many Quakers' religious life. “Whilst we take the planning of criminal acts very seriously, we believe that this incident is a deliberate targeting of committed young people who want to make our country a more equitable place. This raid is part of a systematic stifling of dissent. “That this is the second time in a year that the police have raided our meeting house dramatically illuminates the broader trend in the UK of cracking down on those who disagree with the government. The right to protest is fundamental to our democracy. It's a key part of how people make their voices heard between elections.”
Statement from @quaker.org.uk about tonight's police raid on Westminster Meeting House. Guys, I don't think they're buying the Met's line about it all being a cover for plotting "mass shoplifting"
In a few months, I'm doing a talk about how computing has lots its way, and I'm looking for input.
What irks you about working with computers (be it laptops / desktops / smartphones / ...) today?
For example: "every software is a subscription now, and we own nothing."
They’re trying to get us to be enthousiastic about AI - BUT WE DONT EVEN HAVE WORKING PRINTERS YET. I WANT A PRINTER THAT PRINTS WHEN I HIT THE PRINT BUTTON, I don’t want AI to predict when I will need new shoelaces, based on my search history for medieval paintings. ALL I WANT A WORKING PRINTER.
And that annoying pop-up: ‘Cannot find printer.’
Me: THERE, YOU IDIOT. IT’S RIGHT THERE!
I was watching Pete Hegseth foaming at the mouth, and for no particular reason a line from Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth came to mind: 'I’m going to be free even if I have to kill everyone in the world for it’.
Thank you! I may have to postpone that murder spree after all.
Mine is Firefox, and it doesn't seem to. On the plus side, the updated Firefox allows you to switch off all AI for websites through their portal. So it might well be an improvement.
Ah yes, the 'if only I had's...
My computer updated itself last night, and closed all 37 of my tabs with articles from 1860s newspapers. I can get a jury entirely composed of academics, and no conviction for a murder spree could ever be achieved, correct?
What’s your costume for World Book Day this year? I’m going as a Generative AI Subsidiary Content Aggregation Addendum to an already one-sided academic publishing contract
NHS official pushed to add patient data to Palantir platform whilst also advising company
A lobbyist who worked directly for Peter Mandelson, on the Palantir board, and on the board of *four* NHS trusts.
Lobbying the NHS to hand over even more patient data to Palantir.
This absolutely stinks. Get Palantir out of the NHS. Sign my petition:
you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/st...
I had a CBT therapist [name redacted to protect the guilty] who ended every session in a white rage, shouting at me. He is now a regular ‘expert’ consultant for a major newspaper advice columnist [name redacted to protect the gullible].
The groundswell of anger against Katie Hopkins touring Britain like she's just some normal celebrity grows.
Well done to local people in Dorset who aren't taking it lying down.
www.change.org/p/katie-hopk...
A photo of this week’s blood moon. Silhouetted in front of the moon are the figures of Greek warriors commemorating the battle of Salamina in the 5th c. BCE.
The blood moon, captured by Petros Giannakoursi, for the AP.
Robert Duvall as the deranged Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, bare-chested with ?confederate hat on his head and explosions in the background.
What Whisky Pete sees when he looks in the mirror.
Pictures can be so much more powerful than words: before and after photos of the bombing in the Middle East.
www.ledevoir.com/monde/moyen-...
BREAKING: Party that Believes Government is Only for Self-enrichment Stops Showing Up When the Money-tap is Turned Off.
Another techno-democracy-destroyer from an Israeli company: an app that roots through your contacts, & every time one of your friends posts a ‘dissident’ political opinion on social media, it responds with an AI-generated rebuttal, supposedly from a real person.
This is the take they posted. Imagine how bad the others were…
The ‘ugly misogyny at the polling stations’ that saw those dreadful misogynists elect — a woman?
A map produced by Morning Consult showing where 1900 respondents guessed where Iran was on a map. The guesses are, shall we say, an indictment of 6th-grade geography classes everywhere.
Those 1,000 Americans consulted were no doubt those who located Iran in *checks notes* Dorset (UK), Normandy (France), plus locations in Sweden, Poland and India.
Wise move. They’re bound to have useful insights, not those pesky experts.
🚨 It looks like the UK government is gearing up to upend copyright law in favour of AI companies, legalising the theft of their work.
This is despite creatives' huge protests, and despite previous proposals being roundly rejected by the public.
Please spread the word.
🧵 1/4
