Neville Morley

New music project: the mating dance of the newt as modal jazz.

So there is a story about the "top 10 cities at risk during nuclear war" circulating in various tabloids/etc. with my name attached to it, and I will say that a) I never have (nor would) make such a list at all, and b) I never said any of the quotes attributed to me in the article.

So, what do we think about England’s innings? All out for under 120 by the 15th over as they try to slog their way to somewhere within reach?

Archer 4-0-61-1!!??!!??

Imagine Tantalus satisfied.

Pape isn't wrong to point out how airpower alone was unable to bring down the Nazis in 1943-44, Viet Minh in 1947-75 or that despite all Israeli efforts Hamas still exists.

Yet in all three cases airpower turned economies and infrastructure into a sea of rubble that took/will take years to rebuild

In this book, I demonstrate how the author of these interminable emails is in fact Mark the Evangelist/Josephus/Plato/G.W.F Hegel…

Minor point, but three cheers for Daniel Kehlmann.

🧵There’s a very obvious problem with withdrawing support from asylum seekers: what happens next? Let’s consider some non mutually exclusive possibilities…

Billionaire-owned media celebrating the industrial slaughter of human beings by machines as a wondrous leap forward.

Grammarly's presentation of something they call Expert Review, including my name (plus Stephen King's, plus Mary Norris's), though to be sure I've never been contacted by Grammarly, much less compensated.

What in the absolute fuck is this.

It’s clear (to me) from LLM debates on here about whether AI can produce a good literature review that there are two paradigms of lit review at work. 🧵…

Brilliant. An expat im Dubai has a startling revelation, by @stephencollins.bsky.social

bloody HELL

But he was a Reith Lecturer! Surely this must be original and profound?

Middle East conflict offers economic lifeline to Russia’s flagging war machine With much of the world’s oil supplies out of action, Russia could step in to meet demand in China and India

You might even say that Trump has opened up a second front.

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

Unless you’re suggesting that if everyone got tenure then no one would be using the magic text generator - unlikely, given that some of the loudest cheerleaders are tenured already - then (1) both are problems, (2) it seems more plausible that AI will make the academia problem worse than better.

Oh good, a typo in my very first post. Obviously GenAI would never have done that. I have seen the light and will now get with the programme.

Natural’s Not In It Apparently there is now a gimmick on Grammarly which, if you upload an academic paper, offers you feedback and suggestions on it from a selection of relevant scholars – the example I saw on s…

Or, they're just rather stupid. Anyway, this does confirm my commitment to old-fashioned artisanal academic production rather than the industrial factory model...

thesphinxblog.com/2026/03/03/n...

Which tends to suggest that this has nothing to do with the advancement of human knowledge and everything to do with the advancement of individual ambition, trying to max their gains before the bubble bursts. Or, these people are arrogant enough to imagine that more of *their* papers must be good.

It's as if they think human happiness and understanding will be improved by producing so many crappy papers that every individual on earth gets their own personal one.

Beyond pure individualism, the only remotely plausible argument seems to be that more academic papers published equates to greater knowledge and understanding, in a linear manner. And that really isn't very plausible, given likelihood of diminishing returns and the good stuff getting buried in slop.

In a world where academic status and money are distributed solely on the basis of productivity and number of papers, that makes sense at the individual level - at risk of destroying the entire structure of publication and quality control, but clearly we're into 'tragedy of the commons' territory.

One might just about imagine an argument that using AI lets us get the research done in less time to compensate for ever-growing pressure of other demands, but that seems like an unwarranted surrender to crisis of neoliberal university. Mostly, they seem to plan to produce more good-enough papers.

Some individuals disclaim this for themselves, but suggest it's an unavoidable future, hence the rest of us should get with the programme; everything is going to be flooded with GenAI slop so we need to join the trend to avoid getting left behind. And this is from people who are in favour of it!

One of the many weird about current academic "I handed over most of my research to Claude and triplemaxxed my productivity" discourse is the focus on time-saving rather than quality. It's not about producing better research, but about producing three times as much just-about-good-enough research.

Like LLM output, "much of what passes for prestigious literary prose isn’t actually sophisticated. It performs difficulty without requiring concentration. It’s self-consciously vacillating, repetitive, and 'writerly' and so gets classified as serious literature"

Even better, along the lines of The Finn in @greatdismal.bsky.social’s Mona Lisa Overdrive, equipped with offensive laser.

Natural’s Not In It Apparently there is now a gimmick on Grammarly which, if you upload an academic paper, offers you feedback and suggestions on it from a selection of relevant scholars – the example I saw on s…

If someone is going to bring me back as an AI construct to comment on the work of random students, it had better be as the full package: impatient with sloppy argument structure, sarcastic, obsessed with correct apostrophe use.

thesphinxblog.com/2026/03/03/n...

Natural’s Not In It Apparently there is now a gimmick on Grammarly which, if you upload an academic paper, offers you feedback and suggestions on it from a selection of relevant scholars – the example I saw on s…

Using GenAI for research is less like taking a helicopter to the solution rather than finding your own way, and more like stepping into the alien teleport device to find yourself heaven knows where by means unknown.

thesphinxblog.com/2026/03/03/n...