Andrew

I like that this is, in some ways, basically the same idea as scouring the white horses - it's there, it'd be a shame if it got tatty, so let's look after it.

"If plagiarism is now part of student writing, what should institutions actually evaluate? Essays should be judged by evidence, structure, argument, and accountability, not by guesses about what website the student bought it from."

It is a firmly held belief among many people who clearly use AI to do their writing that because they themselves are rigorous, or serious, or academic, of course their writing sounds that way, it's not the AI's voice at all. It's wrong, but by goodness they do love to believe it.

Today in "headlines that make a modern reader blink a bit" - Leicester Evening Mail, August 1944

This is properly weird - Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh seems to attract such things! blog.historicenvironment.scot/2026/10/the-...

“For those who like that sort of thing,” said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, “That is the sort of thing they like.” ― Muriel Spark, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘔𝘪𝘴𝘴 𝘑𝘦𝘢𝘯 𝘉𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘪𝘦

Spent the evening slowly and carefully making photo prints, turning out about four an hour, chemical trays and negatives and all. Meanwhile, my phone buzzed to say someone was trying to reset the password on my Instagram account. Feel like I picked the right path here tbh.

Man in a gilet stood on platform 12 gives up on reading the display and asks ChatGPT out loud if he is on the right platform for his train. I don’t want to be dramatic about it but Eratosthenes figured out the circumference of the Earth using a stick and knowledge of a distant well.

For an October Friday: Robert Garioch, "Owre Weill" (October 1961)

what I find hilarious about this particular made-up moral panic is that for approximately the last forty years, "when Charles is king, he'll put hedgehogs on the money" would have been the most uncontroversial but faintly amusing prediction imaginable

Way back when, I canvassed Twitter for similar tales. My favourite, and one I still think about eight years later, was this.

I get the appeal of nostalgia, I really do, but I find it specifically funny to get a leaflet from Reform's candidate talking about how when he was in the Met 31 years ago, he would never have dreamed of lawlessness like the kind we now see in Kings Cross.

One thing I find endlessly funny about the rise of AI is that it has revealed that there is a large number of people who believe that the reason they wrote essays at school or university is their teachers were desperately waiting for them to provide a definite answer to “Lear: what’s up with him?”

"the actual benefits are, of course, that I am now untouchably rich"

two hundred years from now, we will either be taking weekend breaks to the moon or hoping the barley crop in the rubble of Camden doesn't fail again, and yet in both timelines somehow the government will still be putting off deciding whether to expand Heathrow www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Well this was sadly inevitable

About a year ago I dug into the story of James Shearer, a corporal in a field hospital in WWI who thought he'd invented a revolutionary new medical device. He hadn't. But ... things got a little out of hand. Finally wrote it up: www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2026/ja...

A terrific deep dive by @generalising.bsky.social about James Shearer, a soldier and serial fantasist who in 1916 falsely claimed to have invented a new type of medical imaging device - something like an X-ray machine, but for soft tissue and internal organs rather than bones

Wrote a 3000 word blog post last night. Trying to post it has got to "if I can get this server to stop thinking it's WinSCP when I ssh in, then I can get at the underlying configuration files and reset the password to the Wordpress admin account". self-hosting: endless enrichment!

My abiding memory of Waverley as a kid is those orange seats. Somehow more memorable than the actual trains.

always hilarious when stuff that people insist must be a signifier of an optimistic techno-utopia turn out to just kinda suck

Getty Images is going under with $2bn in debt. How do you run a boring licensing company and yet lose that much money? octus.com/resources/ar...

🍿 so, everything about this is the most interesting thing ever to me. If you think having to read other people's AI-generated documents is boring, at least you can skim those. What happens when someone gives a circuitous and overblown AI-generated speech? You just have to sit and listen.

Like Mike, I have a degree in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science (mine's a little older). Here he articulates what I've felt but not quite understood about why the new AI explosion doesn't excite me in the way I'd have expected.

Kitty map! This is how cats migrated to Europe. Great little writeup in the post too: buff.ly/3ttaUWg

you would bloody well hope not, surely www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Today, 19 September, is Batman Day. You’d think there would be a signal or something but Anyway, here’s “Batman’s Aff His Nut”, by Robert Florence #poem #poetry #Batman #BatmanDay mothdancepoetry.wordpress.com/2018/10/13/b...

Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room! Good catch. You *can* fight in here. That’s on me. I’ve updated the list of rooms that it’s confirmed you can fight in.

Happy #NationalFoxDay to all who celebrate! 🦊 #fox #poem #poetry Ian Hamilton Finlay FOX see me wan time ah wis a fox an wis ah sleekit! ah gaed slinkin      heh an snappin      yeh the blokes aa sayed ah wis a GREAT fox aw nae kiddin ah wis pretty good had a whole damn wood in them days hen

Sometimes, the big camera isn't quite the right tool for the job

So they realized they're in the gutter, no revenue in sight, operating at a tremendous loss, and suddenly decided to slow down "to save the humanity."