Apparently it's news now that something 'may or may not' have happened
06.03.2026 16:18
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Apparently it's news now that something 'may or may not' have happened
I love watching people use LLMs in public. They’ll reply to a breaking news article and say “@grok is this true?” Babe where do you think it’s about to pull its answer from
When a reading of text has proceeded by laborious stages within the test-rig of detailed study, pause to allow the overall effect to integrate back into a coherent human reading, and ponder whether your life may even have been changed, just a little, or your beliefs about large questions; whether your habits of feeling have been flattered or boastfully challenged, or whether your relation to the text builds up a kind of trust. This aspect is what you will take away with you when all the study is finished, and it should last you through a lifetime.
J. H. Prynne, on reading
The cement was actually still drying :/
Actually no, but shortly after... (The baby, however, wasn't a baby, but a teenager!)
Yikes, no, but I did wish I hadn't read that book
And only once :(
Ian McEwan once hired me as a babysitter
A headline crying out to be in the Viz Profanisaurus
Party Total reported Donations accepted (excl. public funds) Public funds accepted Total accepted in this quarter Alliance - Alliance Party of Northern Ireland £65,140 £20,538 £44,602 £65,140 Conservative and Unionist Party £4,216,224 £2,401,452 £1,614,729 £4,016,181 Co-operative Party £131,180 £131,180 £0 £131,180 Democratic Unionist Party - D.U.P. £104,320 £0 £104,320 £104,320 Green Party £294,069 £189,010 £98,764 £287,773 Labour Party £2,043,007 £1,943,824 £31,836 £1,975,660 Liberal Democrats £2,190,101 £1,314,139 £749,173 £2,063,312 Open Party £197,151 £155,067 £0 £155,067 People Before Profit £8,605 £0 £6,453 £6,453 Plaid Cymru - The Party of Wales £63,967 £30,000 £33,967 £63,967 Reform UK £5,473,000 £5,456,000 £0
The funding gap between Reform UK and the Greens is astounding.
New Electoral Commission stats today reveal the reportable donations in Q4 2025:
🟢 Green Party: £189,010
🟣 Reform UK: £5,456,000
Greens are bringing in barely 3.5% of Reform UK's large donations - but still polling around 20%.
My books bring to light the alienation that was already present in my readers
The Bookseller comment piece title: Are your books unintentionally alienating readers?
Poets!
My first experience of poetry
Cromer cherryade is powerful stuff
Sign saying ‘our bartenders are so light fingered they could be concert pianists’ Why, are they going to rob me?
I feel they have misunderstood this expression:
remember when that Victorian guy wanted to build a massive pyramid of death in london because there wasn't any space to bury anyone. man wanted a really big necropolis in north london to really set the tone and lower the house prices
I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.
theyre just all so fucking stupid and we were told we had to be respectful and treat their stupid fucking opinions seriously even though we knew its all bull shit and now here we are
British newspaper journalism 2026:
The Daily Telegraph publishes a fabricated - ENTIRELY fabricated - story in order to pursue its fanatical defence of private education.
The Conservatives are, after all, well placed to know a lot about this morass, since they introduced it. In 2012, the coalition government launched the Plan 2 system of student loans and raised university fees across Britain to £9,000 per annum. To put Plan 2 in simple terms, loan repayments were laid out via a seemingly innocuous series of calculations. The first to consider is the threshold at which repayments begin. If you left education with, say, £27,000 worth of debt, you would only start paying it back once you met a predetermined salary. On its face, this might not seem like a particularly onerous demand. “Low-earning” graduates would avoid being saddled with repayments before they were financially able to begin making them, while their “high earning” peers could start chipping away at their debt, and provide an income stream for the state.
As any of my fellow literature or history graduates will tell you, however, the devil is in the details. For one thing, the threshold at which someone becomes a high earner was never particularly high and, following years of inflation, is now preposterously low. Rachel Reeves’ announcement that the government are freezing the threshold at April 2026 levels (£29,385) for a further three years only makes this worse. The real living wage for London is currently calculated at £28,860, which means that any London-based graduate making just £40 more per month than the minimum needed to live there will automatically begin paying their debt. In real terms, this means practically any graduate in any form of full-time work will be paying as much as 9 per cent of their income to the state, and for a very, very long time. Worse still, the amount owed by those graduates below the threshold does not remain static – it accrues interest, year on year, whether you’re working for low wages, volunteering, taking a career break or on maternity leave, ensuring that if you do pass the threshold some time later, you will be returning to find your original £27,000 much enlarged.
If the state’s attitude to what constitutes “high earnings” makes you think it’s oblivious to the concept of inflation, let me put your mind at ease. When it comes to the calculation of student loan interest, they are very conscious of inflation indeed. Each year, the interest charged on student loans is calculated by two components. The first is the Retail Price Index (RPI), which generally records a higher number than the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Governments prefer the latter, lower figure for many of their other calculations, just not when it comes to adding extra debt to every graduate in the country. To this is added a second component, a percentage tied to each graduate’s earnings, meaning that as your salary increases so too does the interest you’re paying on the loan you took out. If you think this seems like a predatory and punitive way to bilk students for as much money, and over as long a period of time, as possible, then you’re just about up to speed on this scandal, which amounts to a regressive stealth tax on every graduate in the UK. One which, it’s calculated, you would need to be earning £66,000 per year to pay off in anything like a timely fashion.
The debt burden of UK students is one of those things where, the more you look into the details, the more insane and predatory it is. So I tried my best to explain the numbers involved without making my, or your, head explode.
Bridgerton the River Kwai?
They’re calling it the most ambitious crossover event in history
Bridgerton over the River Kwai
RIP to hundreds of Iranians and one American vacation
When the New York Public Library's wealthy trustees tried to get rid of physical books, & turn the beloved main branch (guarded by the two lions) into a kind of upscale mall, they presented this as inevitable too.
People fought back—turns out people really like books!—& they had to drop the plan.
Haiku
Reform win a seat: The true Volk have spoken and we all must listen.
Greens win a seat: Early reports that Muslims may have ‘voted’ (an ancient Islamic practice designed to steal elections). How severely should the franchise be limited in response?
There's a lot of mean-spiritedness about people who have gone to live in Dubai. We need to help, and ensure they have secure accommodation in the UK for 91 days of the next tax year.
