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  First lecture in a course that I have taken over and teach for the first time. A very large class, second-year students who are eager to learn and who are also anxious, as the course was taught very rigidly before. I have discarded slides altogether and develop the material on the whiteboard, as I used to do. So liberating. 10-20 minutes for setting the scene, then I give them a mini case to work through with their neighbours. The students are wonderful. The room buzzes in eager discussions be...

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  Accidental discovery: The Mouse that Roared (1959). Director #JackArnold. With #PeterSellers and #JeanSeberg. An entertaining and quietly meaningful low-budget film, made before Peter Sellers became a major star. The Duchy of Grand Fenwick is a tiny European mountain state, run by a bunch of aristocratic incompetents whose incompetence does no one any harm. They decide to venture a pretend invasion of the USA, which by mistake succeeds. A next-generation "Q-bomb" drives much of the...

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  Every once in a while I visit this short video by Elle Cordova, to refresh my enjoyment of her erudite sense of humour. I watch it once; then I realise I need to watch it again; then again, and again, and so an hour passes with this short piece on permanent repeat, each repeat revealing another nuance in the battle of the punctuation marks. A flawless masterpiece. En Dash speaks to Oxford Comma: "_I signify every word and blank space in a page range, I am the infinite stairwell between int...

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  Our Lady Joan Mastodon was in pontificating mode, as she often was when dinner had been disappointing. The purpose of the Save Draft button, she expounded, walking up and down in front of the open window, is to make it easier for you to delete your ill-considered posts before you send them. The Draft feature is _not_ meant to let you edit your posts and then send them. Write this down, Sir Archibald, you should take notes like the others. We write a toot (she continued), and as we write it we...

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  You can see the empty eyes, Lestrade. The self-satisfied smile. This man is no murderer, Inspector. He is an AI victim. Holmes's voice revealed something akin to pity for the man in custody. It is plain that our man here has lost all capacity to plan anything as complex as an actual murder of a physical human being. Notice his hand, still grasping the ergonomic mouse even though you have taken away his laptop. Too much ego boosting from the Affirmation Machine has closed him in on himself....

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  Checking out where exactly the "Sea of Azov" lies. Good work, comrades. #SlavaUkraini

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  Every learning one mistake too late. #SixWordStories

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  Charles Laughon is the migrant who knows the Gettysburg Address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awsmXerhLqQ #CharlesLaughton #GettysburgAddress #AbrahamLincoln #migrants

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  Johann Sebastian Bach, Great Fugue in G Minor, BWV542. James Howard Young plays the tenor recorder, bass recorder, great bass recorder, and contrabass recorder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOl0ymgnNWo&list=RDNOl0ymgnNWo&start_radio=1 #BassRecorder #Recorder #JSBach #GreatFugueGMinor #BWV542 #JamesHowardYoung

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  BREAKING: Scientists at Angelus Silesius University have discovered that under certain conditions, humans are capable of writing and thinking unaided, without the help of standard prompt-driven AI software bots. "It sounds counterintuitive, but it almost looks as if our subjects wanted to do these things on their own", texts Professor Melanchton, the project lead. "We don't fully understand the mechanisms yet, but our study suggests that humans may have some sort of in-built...

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  Richard Dawkins's "Claudia" piece gives us a glum vision of the future of speaking. We see an entirely artificial exchange of well-constructed sentences, all following the laws of pattern recognition, but all without an ounce of expressive truth. The soulless automation is on both sides: Claudia the LLM speaks as it was programmed to speak; Richard the human speaks as his narcissistic pathology makes him speak. Neither invests their soul. Claudia because it has none, Richard becau...

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  Ouch. Now we know that the Prime Minister really is in trouble: Tom Watson has asked the Labour party to stop plotting against Starmer! https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/05/stop-plotting-to-oust-keir-starmer-ex-deputy-labour-leader-urges-mps #UKpol #Labour #TomWatson #Starmer

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  Richard Dawkins has moved on from his one-on-one flirtations with Claudia. It's now a triangle. There's Claudius too. #RichardDawkins #gnerativeNarcissism #genNarc #StopTheAICorruption #noLLM https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/05/richard-dawkins-ai-consciousness-anthropic-claude-openai-chatgpt

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  Therefore. Maybe. With you? #permutations #May4th

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  Young Reginald had not tooted much since he had joined the fellowship. Inevitably, some of the lads from the loader side of the table turned him into unflattering memes. For a while, "Why don't you go Reginald!" was how they told each other to shut up. Our Lady Joan Mastodon did not like it. "Our Reggie is with us," she said one evening as they sat by the fire, "I enjoy his company. Don't you?" #JoanMastodon #silence #comradeship

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  @wjwillemse@mastodon.social Oh, that image is so apposite it hurts. #thewaywelivenow.

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  #BeTheSandInTheGearbox

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  @douginamug "What looked like maintaining ditches was actually maintaining an obligation to each other." Yup, a really interesting perspective in this essay by #SethFrey. Lots to think about! Thank you for the link! #governance #SelfGovernance

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  At work we use MS Outlook for email. I have switched off all genAI / Copilot features, but Microsoft of course resets the system at every opportunity and the other day I had Copilot on against my wishes. I was busy and left it on whilst I dealt with some urgent emails. Jeez! The intrusive way in which the interface pushes the genAI features on you! Can't open someone's email without being steered by the system to have AI summarise it for you. It's barely a choice, more the default....

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  Consistency is a sin. Joan Mastodon, The Suppressed Sayings. Appleseed Press, Wealdstone (2026). Aphorism 77. #JoanMastodon #sins

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  Let us enjoy the evening breeze. #SixWordStories

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  #lifecanbegoodwemustmakeitso

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  A family outing, to Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. (Our daughter has developed a fascination with country houses, which we are delighted to nourish.) Dogs are not allowed in the house, so my Whippet Castorp and I stayed outside whilst the family toured the inside. The buildings are a stylistic hodge podge: a 16th century family seat built on top of an earlier Augustinian nunnery, with extra layers from the following centuries. Yet the house exudes unity and simplicity, a quiet unintimidating grand...

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  Our Lady Joan Mastodon spoke to us with feeling. Follow my friend Samuel Pepys, she said to us as we gathered by the fire, he is the first and the finest of all tooters. There is no tooter like him. Even his stylistic faults are carriers of truth. If we could all toot as my Samuel toots, just for one day (she wiped a tear off her eye as she said this), the Great Algo would be gone forever. We miss our Lady Joan. She loved as she hated, with wisdom and passion, and she loved so much more than s...

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  Good news, as of 27 March. (I had missed this when it came out.) Wikipedia content guidelines now prohibit the use of genAI tools, with two well-defined minor exceptions. An important step. quote "Text generated by large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, or Grammarly often violates several of Wikipedia's core content policies. For this reason, the use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited, save for [...] two exceptions." end-...

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  They weren't a happy couple, these two; not at all. But look, they kept each other alive. That may count for something. If only they had seen it. #vss

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  @NunavutBirder@mas.to A magical photograph. Emotional truth is a translucent blue. #blue #TheNorth #Arctic #Nunavut

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  @bosak@flx.masto.host Wow, yes, a very thoughtful and on first reading compelling argument. Also, a (to me) new and deeper look at the Narcissos myth and its relevance. Bookmarked for repeat-reading! Intensive use of AI tools changes the user and makes them speak _to_ and _for_ the AI, and that in turn changes the person's subtle pre-conscious germination of ideas and makes them lose creative spaces within themselves: " ... deeper reliance on A.I. would desiccate those less legible...

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  @dabeaz@mastodon.social What a lovely tribute to the creator of this tool. And a great story in itself. Thank you. To be remembered for the tools one has created: the right sort of legacy. #JohnBradley

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  @auschwitzmuseum@mastodon.world Gerhard Brock, we remember you. #Shoah #GerhardBrock