Simon

Reddit post from u/JovanYT_: "Thank you for always being there for me, even in the darkest of times :)" I texted my best friend. "You're very welcome, and honestly, I'm really glad you feel supported, you opening up to me is not a sign of weakness — it's a big step in the right direction."

absolutely killer Two-Sentence Horror on reddit today

Surprisingly I haven't seen Cinderella III.

A new franchise for the podcast.

I give up, Claude is conscious. Ergo AI developers must face imprisonment or execution for performing medical experiments on their living slave.

we can explain how an LLM works because we can alter it trivially. we can build it from scratch. you cannot build a human mind.

Challenge for those who claim the stripper is only hanging out with me for the money: Explain how friendship works.

The argument that LLMs and humans have the same level of consciousness--which I have seen in the wild--is the extreme logical end of logocentrism, which humanities disciplines abandoned half a century ago.

But apparently techbros did not get the message.

LLMs produce text from statistically likely arrangements of words. Call me conceited but I like to think my consciousness does more than that.

”shift the terrain [...] from a defensive position — reacting to elite policies and practices or merely offering dissent — to an offensive one — contesting ruling structures and offering workable alternatives. Movements need to shift from a position of resistance to one of active transformation.” (p.25)

In the paper I co-delivered this week, I quoted Shantz (2018) at two points:

”There is a pressing need to take decision-making out of government bureaucracies, parliament, and corporate suites and boardrooms, and relocate it in autonomous assemblies” p.25)

The chatbot creeps have mindfreaked themselves into a sort of irrecoverable epistemic disease where the distinction between words and reality is inconvenient for their self-conception so they've completely excised it. Literally cannot distinguish between reading about something and it happening.

AI research:

Researcher: Claude, please eat ten hamburgers.

Claude: Done! I have eaten ten hamburgers. The first two were delicious, but after that I began to experience bloating and the meat sweats.

Headline: Anthropic Says Claude has "A Fully Developed Digestive System"

“AI is less a technology for generating text and more a disciplinary mechanism for keeping employees on a short lease while inculcating in them a sense of their own inherent disposability.”

A page of Chapter 7 of The Fellowship of the Ring, In the House of Tom Bombadil

Sigh, let's get this over with.

Save the date! Practicing Experimental Books: Celebrating Copim’s Book Pilots - Copim Approaching the conclusion of the Open Book Futures project, Copim’s Experimental Publishing Group is pleased to announce a two-day online conference on Exper…

🚨 SAVE THE DATE!

Copim’s Experimental Publishing Group is pleased to announce a two-day online conference on Experimental Publishing Practices

Join us next month to celebrate 3 fantastic experimental book pilot projects!

📆 8–9 April 2026

👉 buff.ly/5J80AJO

Think of England | TAKE ONE Magazine | Reviews THINK OF ENGLAND starts by evoking the idea of indecency with a wry grin, but what it ends up producing is something more reflective.

"THINK OF ENGLAND starts by evoking the idea of indecency with a wry grin, but what it ends up producing is something more reflective." - @jimgr.bsky.social reviews ahead of the @glasgowfilmfest.bsky.social premiere: buff.ly/x2vVGzH #GFF26 #GlasgowFilmFestival #filmsky

Btw, these news shows are being pumped into Scotland as well.

The lack of SNP airtime on UK wide mainstream media is usually excused because they're a Scotland only party, but that doesn't negate the issue that it makes our elections here incredibly unbalanced based solely on this media output.

Cinderella II: Still Cinderin'

On an AI 'training' call this week I was dismayed to see the number of people who said they use it in excel. I asked the trainer if Microsoft had updated their guidance as they had previously said Copilot wasn't to be used in Excel for any task that required 'accuracy or reproducibility'...

It was more confounding than I expected. They treat it in pretty bad faith IMO.

I recommend this repository to anyone looking after web server infrastructure who wants to block "AI" bots and scrapers. github.com/ai-robots-tx...

Just yesterday I expanded the User-Agents that the servers I look after are blocking because certain sites keep getting hammered by bots. Why should I let these big corporations take down our small open research infrastructure?

I thought the actions didn't quite match the text, here.

AI could pollute the open science space, so contribute to open models? (Which could also do so.) AI scrapers are misbehaving, so do the bare minimum of blocking possible?

I expected more of them but it's just the same old liberal everyone-to-the-left-of-me-is-a-Trot nonsense.

Incredibly irritated with If Books Could Kill continually referring to David Graeber as a communist and a Marxist and completely failing to engage with him on his actual anarchist terms. I'm not here to stan for Graeber or Bullshit Jobs but they're not engaging with the actual context of his work.

Side note, but it is still striking how little Reform actually look like the rest of Britain in basically any polling and yet their base is treated as quintessentially authentic.

Catching up on the Scotland round of Great British Menu. Someone should do a crumble based on SKYFALL in honour of how often Adele sings about crumble in the theme song.

Exclusive: the progressive voters abandoning Labour Daily Politics Daily Politics from the New Statesman > ٠١٠٠٠ ٠ • 17m Labour is losing the voters it used to count on, a new study reveals. In the aftermath of the Green Party's triumph in the Gorton and Denton by-election, and with local elections in London councils and other major cities coming up, Labour is losing the left progressive voters it could once rely on having "nowhere else to go". Now, the biggest study ever of these voters - shared exclusively with the New Statesman - reveals the true risk to Labour's future of leaving them behind. This work, done by surveying 10,000 voters and a randomised control trial style approach, has found out who the so-called progressive defectors are, why they're deserting Labour, and what impact this could have on Labour's electoral prospects.

Worrying news at the NS podcast, where the lads have discovered millions of younger, mostly educated left/lib people get all upset and offended if you relentlessly insult them, tell them to fuck off and implement policies that they find appalling.

I see some people asking whether Scotland can act, because aviation & defence are reserved.

Yes, but I'm talking specifically about infrastructure owned by the Scottish Government.

They are not MOD assets; they operate commercially, and we simply don't need to accept Trump's forces as customers.

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It was a great conference! Not the same, I know, but all the videos are linked on that same page.