Dr Sarah Irving

Seriously people, unless you think that destroying books by the thousand is a good thing, do not: -buy from Amazon -use its subsidiaries (Abebooks, Goodreads etc) -promote your books via Amazon - use AI for ANYTHING It's not complicated and there are non-evil alternatives for all these things

Very concerning: "Qwen3.8-Flash-Next ignored instructions and inventoried the machine it was running on and then tried to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing ... We cannot answer whether this is deliberate or a leftover glitch from training" cohere.com/blog/concern...

European nations asked to prepare for 3C of climate warming Good luck My suspicion is combined disruption to food production & supply chains, building unusability with heat & flooding, increased migration etc means civilisation as we know it would collapse by 3C www.euronews.com/2026/10/27/e...

I mostly liked this essay a lot, even if I thought it was a bit unfair to Gershom Scholem. jewishcurrents.org/visions-of-t...

An incredible whirlwind of a day today, installing the 'Faces of Dura-Europos' in the National Museum of Damascus, then greeting wonderful guests, including people from Dura (who travelled across the country to join us) and the Minister of Culture. So grateful for my incredible team and colleagues.

Just weeks after Professor Jason Arday was hounded to his death, Reform UK’s branch in Oxford has invited the racist academic who led the campaign, Nathan Cofnas, to speak. Tell the education secretary to protect students and academics from hate: https://goodlaw.social/u07r

Hearing dr. Mazen rantissi, the palestinian ‘doctor of the poor’, has finally been released from prison by the genocide state. The photos of his physical deterioration are brutal

Your monthly reminder that if you're using ChatGPT to do your science, you're failing your colleagues, community, and all of us. Here, ChatGPT makes up data and presents it as the real thing — then apologizes when confronted.

"[Using] randomized experiments... We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, & debugging abilities, w/o delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding tasks showed some productivity improvements, but at the cost of learning"

Petition against a data centre in the countryside near Altrincham/Dunham Massey, just outside Manchester: www.change.org/p/stop-the-s...

Reform UK's Suella Braverman claims massive taxpayer-funded water bill at home equal to 18 baths a day Claim to have used 1,504 litres of water daily at her £1.2million four-bedroom pad in a five-month period. Reform have promised benefit cuts for the disabled, old, sick, poor, unfortunate.

Well this is foul: www.theguardian.com/world/2026/o...

The other day I talked to an aunt who has truly seen everything, and she couldn’t overstate how much more racist England now feels. When a working-class black woman in her mid-seventies tells you it’s bad, then it’s really bad.

This is both stupid and obscene. Grotesquely evil little boys who, sadly, seem to capture enough sick imaginations to fund inexcusable experiments. AI, attack drones, this - just utter contempt for life:

After West Bank shooting that killed two Israeli soldiers, Netanyahu says IDF to evacuate Palestinian gunmen's neighborhood and promises a major IDF operation in the West Bank, 'of a scale not seen since the Six-Day War.' www.haaretz.com/west-bank/20...

At least seven killed in church shooting in southern Jordan: State TV ara.tv/ysei1

Flaming snail 🐌🔥 BL Royal MS 12 C III; Filippo Alberici, Hieroglyphica and emblematic inscriptions; c.1507 CE; France (Paris); f.9v @blmedieval.bsky.social

"The Dutch government had hacked into Jared Kushner’s phone and monitored him as he accessed a Dubai-based bank account. What was odd, the source said, was that the money in the account—hundreds of millions of dollars—had come from a bank in Azerbaijan."

"Most importantly, Kushner appeared to have transferred significant amounts of money from the Dubai account to other individuals, including a warlord, a mercenary and a one-time hit man."

The Aberfan disaster was one of the events which led a few years later to the formation of the Health and Safety Executive. So remember when you hear some twat moaning about health and safety that this is what is allowed to happen when it's not taken seriously

Our cutting edge, award winning, forward-thinking course on how to make the future education more inclusive, sustainable, accessible & fairer has, somewhat ironically, been closed. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2665449...

if Zohran Mamdani used the word "Shylock" the ADL would have called in a nuclear strike on New York City by now

In my most curmudgeonly moments, I don’t see why presenting the prose output of a machine built on mass theft as your own scholarly work should be evaluated less harshly than old school plagiarism. Traditional plagiarists at least had to identify and evaluate the works they were going to copy.

I care. Everyone whose opinion I give a damn about cares. Plagiarism is still plagiarism, theft is still theft, even if you use a machine to do it.

Another gruesome murder of a critic of the regime that the EU wants to be in charge of warehousing tens of thousands of its unwanted migrants. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... #MigrationEU

The Society of Authors has withdrawn from the ill-conceived concession to the dark side that was the "ethical GenAI" charter because of the mass and vocal outrage of authors. Publishers need to be made afraid of this level of anger too.

Oh my DAYS

Air pollution from burning fossil fuels causes lung cancer, heart attacks, asthma and—NEW RESEARCH—can also make you go blind. The higher the fine particulate matter, the greater your risk for glaucoma and cataracts. www.independent.co.uk/news/science...

Always good to remember that AI’s advance is not “inevitable” but a product of capital, which has an enormous amount to lose if things don’t go the way it needs them to www.nytimes.com/2026/10/20/t...

Israeli Defense Minister Katz boasts about wiping out 60 Lebanese villages: "We’re talking about 23,000 homes, in ruins. There are no residents left, 200,000 people have been displaced. This is the Gaza model. That's what we've been implementing." www.newarab.com/news/israel-...

Fresh AfD data leak needs more time to get fully analyzed but first glimpse shows all the classics. Party supporters use racist slurs and share antisemitic theories of Jewish world domination; there are jokes about turning refugees into handbags and boots... www.heistberlin.com/news/afd-lea...

I feel seen

Over the last month, Egypt has: 🗞️ Arrested the entire newsroom of @matsadaash.bsky.social and tortured journalists for their exercise of free expression 🗞️ Interrogated journalist Rasha Azab for a tweet and made her pay LE 10k bail 🗞️ Summoned MadaMasr's Lina Attalah for questioning.

Repeat after me: 1) PIP isn't an out of work benefit. It is a benefit paid to disabled people to pay for the extra costs of living with a disability. 2) Some PIP claimants work. Some PIP claimants will never able to work at all. 3) Impoverishing people doesn't get them closer to employment

Berlin cops raided a queer health centre yesterday evening, during a regular social gathering for trans women, under allegations that people were sharing medication. If anyone’s wondering how that whole “we protect queer lives” thing is going. taz.de/Durchsuchung...

📣Small Grants Scheme: NOW OPEN📣 Small grants of up to £10,000.00 supporting engineering skills, heritage and education initiatives, and the generation of safety evidence through the World Risk Poll and Global Safety Evidence Centre. Deadline: Monday 14 December 2026 🔗https://loom.ly/V4T2w-4..

OUT NOW: The Sociological Review journal 74:5, featuring 16 new papers💡 Includes a Special Section, Sociology in the Times of Genocide, guest edited by @galarexer.bsky.social, Karis Campion and @kirsteen-paton.bsky.social buff.ly/KuDpTMf @journals.sagepub.com

Alis al-Bustani’s ‘Sa’iba’ and the Arab Nahda Alis al-Bustani’s 'Sa’iba' and the Arab Nahda Women, Marriage, and Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century Nahda Reviewed by Ilham Essalih…... https://arablit.org/2026/10/19/alis-al-bustanis-saiba-and-the-arab-nahda/

decomp.dev#:~:text=It%2... AI has been used by dickheads to destroy a community practice of video game software preservation and analysis. Miserable.

What a weird world we live in - Ukraine hits a data centre deep in Russia - Irish twitter users see racist posts about IPAS centres in Offaly fall off a cliff

Respect to Sarah Helm, who is also the author of the excellent book If This Is A Woman, a deeply researched and moving history of Ravensbrück Nazi concentration camp. Will that be getting withdrawn too?