Nick Hill

Nick Hill

@nickhill.me

Video producer & animator // début novel, A Small Place, out soon hopefully // sometime pianist // spotter of typos // maker of dad j0kes // nickhill.me 🇪🇺 🇬🇧

423 followers819 following350 posts

friday challenge: you have to make a youtube video with a target audience of 11-16s without using any of the following phrases: "this is insane" "whaaaat" "oh - my - gosh"

Someone at Bjorn should really check the emails they're sending out, because this isn't message they probably want.

if we could all please remember to join hands and help wake up Billie-Jo Armstrong today. Tea & biscuits will be provided

my theory about the Voynich Manuscript is that whoever wrote and illustrated it was just on a very very long phone call

"Can I talk to the press?" "Perhaps this foghorn will answer your question"

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

LMFAO -- Trump is holding an event at the White House right now but there's no audio because the press pool isn't there. The Newsmax host notes that this is an example of Trump's attacks on the press "backfiring just a little bit"

Reminds me somewhat of Hemingway's quote about going bankrupt: "gradually, then very suddenly". (Morally, of course, Trump has always been bankrupt.)

Simon Marks@simonmarksfsn.bsky.social

BREAKING: The White House TV Press pool is downing tools following Trump's ouster of Politico, MSNOW and CNN. This letter sent to pool members by Fox News' Washington Bureau Chief Bryan Boughton, current pool chair, via Scott Nover of the Washington Post.

Got one of those "updated T&Cs" emails today (September 21st). It apparently comes into force on September 15th, so it seems I've already agreed to it before I knew anything was happening.... Doesn't seem to be anything controversial in it, but what if there was?

Here's a quick calculation of the total donations to the five national UK parties from July 2024 til Sep 2026, as registered on the Electoral Commission website. Reform's total donations are about 45% of the entire total, and their average donation size is 9 times that of the next highest (Labour).

It's impressive that OpenAI have managed to settle one of the Millennium Problems by proving that a fluid can form a singularity. But what blew my mind was this sentence

"At all times we maintained the same strict safeguards that we apply to all our frontier model evaluations" Such as the ones that hacked into Hugging face?

Always a good idea to proof-read things and ask yourself: "Is it realistic that anyone is planning to build a data centre 9 times the area of London, in London?" That said, I wouldn't put it past the AI bros, given time...

Nick Hill reposted

Jason Arday's utterly sad death holds a stark mirror up to the dehumanising political-media-societal culture we are in – one we must all be honest about being complicit in – which forgets there is a human being at the centre of a story, a case study, an issue, a scandal. It is dehumanising.

Really do wonder why so many of these people are happy to lose their £500 deposits, just to make a point that will inevitably get lost in the Binface/Cuntface battle

Nick Hill reposted

Forget terraforming Mars. Just stop venusifying Earth.

Dr. Petr Brož@chmee2.bsky.social

Why two nearly identical planets followed completely different evolutionary paths—and how the ESA's EnVision mission may finally reveal what transformed Earth's twin into one of the most hostile world? Check it here. substack.com/home/post/p-...

I'm in the UK. Is there some kind of committee preparing a set of suitably sombre street parties for when the orange guy joins the choir invisible? Maybe samba bands, flypasts, a free bar, that kind of thing?

I made this one for Linkydink, but here it is without the tediously mandatory "what I learned about b2b sales" stuff. A quick comparison of IMAX vs other formats, for The Odyssey.

Context like this is so important any time there's a large number in public life. The average maths GCSE doesn't really help you visualise 000s

Alex Hern@hern.bsky.social

nigel farage could give me a grand a day for the next ten years and still have more than a million pounds cash left over

Nick Hill reposted

It was inevitable, wasn't it🙄 Of course the Telegraph would run with something like this👇 So let's remove some of the rose-tinted spectacles and also look at some of that data comparing 1976 with modern heat waves Because the 1976 nostalgia porn is wearing a bit thin at this stage 🧵1/23

I was bought a book by a kind stranger. Can confirm this is a genuine thing. I very much enjoyed the book, too

Big Green Books@biggreenbooks.bsky.social

It's #buyastrangerabook day! @lancslass.bsky.social is offering to buy someone the book of their choice up to £20. Having just come back from a school re-union, Helen suggests maybe a teacher or a pupil might like it? But it's up for grabs, so if there's a book you'd like, get in touch. UK only

Nick Hill reposted

Musk says not a single person has died due to him axing USAID. Sadly, part of my job involves tracking aid spending. So here’s a thread with just some of the people who lost their lives because of USAID cuts

I'd go as far as to suggest that our outstanding university sector has been the lodestone of UK soft power since the collapse of empire. Think of all the cultural, financial & political leaders from all around the world who've been through UK universities

Lucy Burke@lucyburkemcr.bsky.social

It’s wild that politicians don’t seem to grasp the degree to which universities contribute to the economy- local, regional, national. The failure to intervene is a stain on this govt - a shocking dereliction of duty to every worker, every local business, every student, every area that is suffering

So Iran gets to carry on doing the stuff it's doing, and agrees not to start doing stuff it wasn't doing anyway, and in return it gets all sanctions lifted and $300bn towards reconstruction costs?

Iran's President Ahmad Masoud Pezeshkian has posted the full MOU text on Twitter.

Nick Hill reposted

Iran is awarding him the FAFO Peace Prize.

Eliot Higgins@eliothiggins.bsky.social

Pretty remarkable Trump has managed to upset the anti-war and pro-war branches of the MAGA coalition at the same time. The true Art of the Deal.

Nick Hill reposted

Polls show that only 15% of Americans approve of yesterday’s UFC spectacle on the White House grounds. But in this Palo Alto brothel/ketamine bar, that percentage feels much higher

my stock response to anyone who says "i'm using AI to do [...,], why aren't you using it?" is "because it's shit and I have taste"

I don't really get what it takes to get an agent to actually read your submission. Have had 5 hard "no"s and 9 ghosts so far out of 27 agents submitted to. Either they're not seeing what I'm seeing, or I'm not seeing something that they are

and again, i find myself coming back to the question: why does he care? what is it about the far-right and hobbyhorses?

George Monbiot@georgemonbiot.bsky.social

There's an exceptionalist belief that the UK's immune to the worst political extremes. In reality, we were lucky not to get a fascist government in the 1930s. Now that the world's richest man supports our most extreme political party, we need more than luck. We need to get the money out of politics.

Nick Hill reposted

It is with deep sorrow and profound love that we announce the passing of Sonny Rollins. The Saxophone Colossus died this afternoon at his home in Woodstock, NY at the age of 95. 1/2

Nick Hill reposted

Robot legs are here and they aren’t going anywhere. [booing begins] Whether you like it or not we are going to cut off all of your legs and arms [booing intensifies] and heads and replace them all with robot legs and only robot legs [shouting over boos] well I can see you aren’t ready for the future