Simon Scott

Simon Scott

@simonscott1975.bsky.social

Mythical regulator. Bi-furious one-way time traveller. Repitching with Peter Dinklage in the lead. Mucks about with a puppet and blender.

284 followers155 following2.4K posts

Watching Microsoft and Google products and services getting worse and worse, while also being aware that they're employing AI-first code more and more, and drawing a natural conclusion.

Imagining Amazon workers like the prisoners in Andor as they endlessly build racks for data centres, except that at least in Star Wars they did eventually switch the Death Star on.

Simon Scott reposted

Delighted to say that Toby Jones, Bill Paterson, Phyllis King and many more will be celebrating the life of #IvorCutler at Foyles Charing Cross on Wed 25 November. We'll be launching the new Selected Poems edited by W.N. Herbert. Join us! Tickets have gone live www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/creamy-pum...

eventbrite.co.ukCREAMY PUMPKINS: A Celebration of Ivor CutlerA cast of actors, poets and musicians come together at Foyles for one night only to celebrate the much missed performance poet.

Lot's of "don't engage with your enemies on socials" talk today which has made me realise that I don't. Not sure if that's just because I'm not on the other place. Definitely quicker to block numpties.

Simon Scott reposted

This is why it's dangerous to give rich people so much power over our lives. Sometimes, they are appallingly ignorant. The Nazis added the word "socialist" to their name purely as propaganda to appeal more to workers. But the party--and Hitler--hated real socialists and communists.

Simon Scott reposted

7 reasons why The Thing (1982) is a Christmas film: 1) snow 2) bearded men concealing surprises 3) compulsory party games 4) introverts shunning group activities 5) digestive issues 6) revellers bursting open to reveal partially assimilated canine lifeforms 7) knitwear

The Castle was quite good on this, specifically Skeptics in the Pub. Started out as a kind of weird science bit of flag waving, and spilled into reactionary (and often unscientific) BS.

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Reminds me of Dana Gould pointing out how all the manosphere podcasters seem to be sponsored by boner pills. "I still get my own boners... like some kind of pussy."

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Simon Scott reposted

A reminder that the “trans lobby” is just trans people going about their lives, and the “fight” being referred to is JK Rowling using her money, power and influence to endorse policy that is killing trans people. I’m amazed she could move to type a new essay with the layers of blood on her hands.

Simon Scott reposted

Trans people outlived BBC Scotlland

The National@scotnational.bsky.social

BREAKING: BBC Scotland will close in spring 2027 as part of cost-cutting measures, the corporation has announced

Genuinely think something is broken in adland that we're getting straplines like: cosmetics company: "believe in possible" hotel company: "you know what you're getting" travel comapny: "you don't just travel, you arrive".

I do find it fascinating that it's turned out Anthropic, after all, is actually worse than OpenAI. I mean, they're both horrendously terrible money bonfires, but Anthropic's managed to maintain a much better veneer of offering sensible, working products than OpenAI have.

Simon Scott reposted

For Anthropic’s IPO they released an ARR which usually means “annual recurring revenue” where a company adds up all the income they’ll get every year as a baseline for profitability. Only, the small print showed it was a Annualised Run Rate where they’d taken their most profitable day times 365.

More Perfect Union@moreperfectunion.bsky.social

BREAKING: Anthropic reports an $80 billion net loss in the first half of 2026.

On Thursdays on the stream we have a rank-off, where chat suggests ten things more or less at random and we order them by preference. It is, like most of the stuff we do, taking the piss out of streaming content. All those "sorting snacks into tiers" streams.

Every so often I will momentarily think about doing a themed one, then have to remind myself that the whole point of our rank-offs is about determining whether butter is better than pelican crossings, so having, say, ten monsters to rank defeats the whole thing.

If you're thinking about how much blood is on Elon Musk's hands by now, you have to use his own metrics, and take into account all of the descendants of his more direct victims that he has also snuffed out of existence.

Feel these companies had assumed they would become too big to fail and that the government would bail them out, then realised too late that they're not banks, so are doing whatever they can to make not bailing them out seem bad.

CNN@cnn.com

Elon Musk has said he will give every child in America a stake in SpaceX, his $2 trillion aerospace and artificial intelligence company, as tech firms face intensifying scrutiny over their impact on society. https://cnn.it/4yWTjTJ

Simon Scott reposted

We’re back with our second story about how Trump’s purge of the FBI killed a sweeping bribery probe in D.C. This time, we take you to South Carolina, where two powerful politicians escaped scrutiny: Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. James Clyburn. THREAD 👇

Simon Scott reposted

Happy 97th birthday to that splendid actor Colin Jeavons. I was delighted to meet him just under a year ago (something I thought would never happen) and he was an absolute delight! So many terrific performances - Blue Remembered Hills, House of Cards, Kinvig, Sherlock Holmes, Blackeyes, etc etc

Tried to talk on stream about when films and TV shows really signal forthcoming plot twists, and why they would do that, and it was pretty much impossible because spoilers.

Is that good?

Ara Kharazian@arakharazian.bsky.social

This chart shows the key risk to the AI trade, and it's missing from the latest revenue announcements. The AI boom is fundamentally driven by a top 1% of companies that drive 80% of spend. Within that top 1%, 80% are venture-backed.

The walkway in the "glass bollock" City Hall building which the architects had intended to be a fire exit route. How long and scenic do you want your walk to be when fleeing a building on fire?

Anna Horroridge@anna-orridge.bsky.social

Lol. Not seen a better demonstration of 'desire path'

What's interesting about the "AI is a powerful tool, you just need to understand how to use it" team, is that "understanding how to use it" usually translates into a massive reduction from the promised level of utility.

Further, if we'd aimed for the level of utility we have (which mostly translates to fuzzy search and summarisation), we could have delivered tech that was much cheaper and less damaging.

Simon Scott reposted

Exclusive: Reform mayor Luke Campbell is under police investigation for allegedly cyberflashing a female member of staff Campbell, an Olympic gold boxer, is accused of having shown a a senior female officer four fully “naked and sexualised images” of himself observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

observer.co.ukReform mayor under police investigation for alleged cyber...Luke Campbell, an Olympic gold medallist boxer and rising star in Nigel Farage’s party, is accused of showing naked pictures of himself to female colleague