Mark Darbyshire🌱🏳️‍🌈

Photo of a cuneiform tablet fragment shaped a bit like an irregular diamond. It preserves nearly 20 incomplete lines of text separated by a horizontal ruling

There's a broken cuneiform tablet from the Old Babylonian period, nearly 4,000 years ago, which preserves a tiny portion of a dialogue between two friends.

It feels a bit like the conversations I've been having for the past week, so I wanted to share it.

I wish it to be known that my writing was em-dash-ridden long before AI was a thing – no matter what platform or device I wrote it on 😂

The reviews searched over 12,000 references. They screened 547 full-text papers for inclusion. They included 17. That's a 96.9% exclusion rate at full text. 530 studies were relevant enough to survive initial screening, then rejected by the review criteria. 6/10 reviews found 0 included studies.

And this is the anti-trans logic loop:

1. demand evidence

2. design reviews that cannot find evidence

3. cite absence of evidence as justification for withdrawing care

4. use withdrawal of care to prevent generation of new evidence.

It's what the Reagan administration did to trans folks.

Yesterday I was using Ctrl+F in Adobe Reader and it wouldn't let me search any further unless I upgraded to an AI plan.

A New Chapter for Bluesky - Bluesky After several intense and incredible years building Bluesky from the ground up, I've decided to step back as CEO and transition to a new role as Bluesky's Chief Innovation Officer.

Some personal news: I’m transitioning from CEO to a new role as Bluesky’s Chief Innovation Officer! I’m excited to welcome @toni.bsky.team as our interim CEO.

More here: bsky.social/about/blog/0...

This man speaks so well.

Just listen to his description of the racist oppression of migrants in Calais that the UK government is spending hundreds of millions of pounds on.

And how he is so clear about the need for solidarity with trans people, and condemning Labour’s appeasement of the right.

Based on this response, they seem to barely use it. That should hopefully get mentioned whenever they talk about its upsides

'I want to sounds smart and inspirational': How ministers use AI Most ministers say they don't use AI – but those who do use it for speechwriting, research, drafting questions to officials and generating images. Marc Daalder reports.

Over summer, I OIA'd every minister for their AI chat logs.

Here's what I found:
newsroom.co.nz/2026/03/06/h...

trump, tech companies sign voluntary pledge to protect consumers from rising elec costs headline trump holding signed bill

a series of charts showing compaines failing on their climate goals

who among you is brave enough to take a guess what happened the last time tech companies made a voluntary pledge to protect the public from the harmful impacts of data centre over-development

This story needs a correction. It is absolutely true that admissions are the highest since October, but 184 admissions is the last 4 weeks (to 16 Feb), not last week (to 16 Feb). 184 in a week is 2022 levels. This would be much easier to keep track of if we had the data rather than a Power BI report

Selwyn-Christchurch train trial to test demand for service | Star News A commuter rail service between Selwyn townships and Christchurch is being investigated by a community board, with planning under way for a one-off...

I hope the trial shows a demand for rail. The buses to the commuter towns are great but get stuck in traffic just like cars do, a train could bypass the traffic and get someone to the city faster than driving

www.odt.co.nz/star-news/st...

Anyway, yet again I am the victim of my too-busy summer. Sigh.

For a flagship release that is designed to be experienced in 3D in a cinema, the cinemas really need to run it for longer, and probably also promote it better.

I was hoping to watch it on a brighter 3D cinema screen than the last Avatar movie – either a smaller screen than last time or an IMAX screen – to enjoy the experience to its full potential.

I'm annoyed that I never got around to watching the new Avatar movie. I refuse to watch it in a cinema in 2D, there are now no screenings left in Canterbury at all, and I missed seeing it on IMAX in Auckland by a day because I got gastro.

I guess mistakes are possible, but again, good to report these so they can be addressed.

After 10 years of service, a JP can apply for JP (Retired) status, and will no longer be listed in the database.

Otherwise, if someone ceases to be a JP then they lose the status entirely. Either way, they will cease to be listed.

If someone is listed, they're almost certainly still a JP.

JPs are meant to keep their details in the database up-to-date and make themselves available at any reasonable time.

If any listed JP is claiming to be retired, or refusing to ever offer their services, then I suggest reporting them to the local JP Association (or to the NZ-wide JP Federation).

The modern fundamentalist evangelical understanding of Armageddon, that is.

Oh my word, they're determined to make Armageddon a self-fulfilling prophecy?!

Subsidies are also a factor, as alluded to in your article. And people who are serious about reducing their meat consumption are likely to look for healthier and more affordable options than fake meat for their day-to-day consumption.

Capitalism abstracts consumption away from the harms that it causes, making it easy for consumers to ignore the harms of intensive agriculture. And in an economy where polluters don't pay and the less pollutive options don't enjoy the same economy of scale, it's hard for ethical choices to compete.

We should also be concerned how much Google has cozied up to the Trump administration.

Trump’s billionaire allies will now own CNN, Fox News, CBS, WaPo, WSJ and NY Post — plus 185+ local tv stations and news in 100 markets.

They also control X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, TikTok, Truth and Twitch.

This is all by design to manipulate and surveil us.

Pay attention.

A home for everybody Sign the open letter supporting the Green Party's plan to make sure everybody has a place they can call home.

Housing should be a priority for any government.
action.greens.org.nz/housing_2026

Maybe if they tackled inequality head-on with progressive tax policies instead of vilifying migrants and pushing ignorant anti-trans policies.

Don't complain about vote-splitting. Campaign for proportional voting – the truly democratic option where vote-splitting is no longer an issue.

We've seen it all before in New Zealand. The tide only turned when a Labour Prime Minister *accidentally* promised us a referendum on our voting system.

I don’t know what I did to deserve two cats that meow to be picked up and then held like a baby 🥲

New research by Karen McBride, an accounting professor at the University of Portsmouth, argues that the weekly Bills of Mortality acted as an early public health information system, shaping how some Londoners navigated life, work and survival during the Great Plague. Drawing on the diary of Samuel Pepys, the study suggests the published death figures were used as "quite practical decision guiding accounts or data of what was going on". The Bills were issued weekly, listing deaths by parish across the capital. They were posted publicly and sold on street corners, allowing readers to compare week-on-week rises and falls.

How Londoners used data to survive the Great Plague www.bbc.com/news/article...

A journal of the plague year: Samuel Pepys and the Bills of Mortality as accounting doi.org/10.1177/1032...

Bills of mortality en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bills_o...

#publichealth #deathstats proto- #opendata