David Pick

I want to ask reporters what else exactly they want from Beth Upton. They wanted her booted out of female changing rooms, they got it. They wanted her on trial for misconduct, they got it, she was found totally blameless. They wanted her publicly named and shamed in the media, they got it…

It's a magical world, Spock, ol' buddy... let's boldly go!

If you’ve read stuff about cyber’s “Black October” it’s worth reading this quote from one of the human beings who found the PHP bug (with the help of AI, AI didn’t find it) Key quote (what happened is big & scary but neither new nor apocalyptic Full article (£) www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/art...

For all incident responses from now on, I’m going to get on that Zoom call at 2am and begin by saying “Please state the nature of the computational emergency.”

"I was told," said the princess, "that the point of fairy tales is not to tell children dragons exist, but that they can be killed." "Oh, absolutely!" said the dragon. "You agree?" "These rich, selfish, powerful, cruel beings that need killing, did you think they're literally dragons, princess?"

The UK demonstrates the downside of voters not much caring about trans issues. It's often held up to show transphobic pandering isn't a winner. And that's true! But the bad side is that a small but well-organised and persistent group of obsessive bigots can do incredible damage if they get in power.

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your CV? Computer hobbyist: Can you read an 8" double-sided floppy?

RT if you've never had a tab of ChatGPT open, period.

“If you don’t like public executions just don’t watch it” says the crowd trying to ban drag shows and books

I am reminded of General Hammerstein-Equord’s classification of officers

Letter printed in The Times today

Oh my: LibreOffice just made "no AI" one of their official features: blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/09...

Sir Ian McKellen orates 'The Stranger's Case' from 'Sir Thomas More' by Shakespeare about the Evil May Day xenophobic riot of 1517 in London. This passage was written 400 years ago, but times never change. Humanity refuses to change its unwarranted bias against 'others'.

A family of cheetah sleep with the forest guard every night. This is what the camera recorded. [📹 Dolph C. Volker / Cheetah Whisperer] Original post

This, presumably, helps explain why so few universities right now want to call getting AI to do your assignment as cheating.

ONLY THOUGHT OF THE DAY… You know ParkRun could save themselves a lot of bother by just ditching the recording of peoples sex… When signing up, people could opt to run on blue team, pink team or purple team, for example. Obviously, most people know what blue and pink may represent 🙄

MI5 issues spy alert to UK universities over Chinese ‘front company’ stealing research www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Queen Mary’s world-leading research excellence and international footprint have been recognised in the 2027 @timeshighered.bsky.social World University Rankings. The University is ranked 32nd in the world for research quality and 15th in the world for international outlook. shorturl.at/0CseE

I was just about to shoot the mother superior's plane down, but she fired a rocket at me first. It turns out that when you lock on to the abbess, the abbess also locks on to you.

Professor Eric Laithwaite shows what happens when a very heavy wheel (20 kg) is spun up to 2,500 rpm. Original post

🖥️ Tech Spec Tuesday: Meet the Acorn Risc PC 600! Launched in 1994 with a 30 MHz ARM610, it offered a clever party trick: add an x86 “guest” CPU and run Windows or MS-DOS alongside RISC OS. Two architectures, one very unusual desktop. #VintageComputer

🔔 BING-BONG! 🔔 May I have your attention, please… There may be a rather important announcement coming your way around the middle of October. That is all. Absolutely nothing else to report. Please go about your business and, most importantly, do not look too closely at the photograph. 👀

I long for a back-to-basics web: Markdown for text, JPEG images, no video, no Javascript or other client-side scripting, writable by a human being with a text editor. Make it as advertising/corporate hostile as possible. And above all keep it *small*. In other words, web like it's 1996 again.

When enough people fail the Turing test, it won't matter whether machines still fail it

will say it again: the most effective way to curb far right agitators like Lowe, "Tommo" et. al. would be to stop their ability to earn money for it from social media or live streaming. So much of it is grifting for revenue, not attention.

1/23 Sorry, this will be long... There is a lot of shouting about what happened in the Channel yesterday. So I want to go back to basic law. Not immigration policies or political rhetoric. At sea, the starting point is simple: Preservation of life comes first under all maritime conventions.

Generative AI is a homogenising technology, which is also one reason why it is particularly beloved by authoritarians. Resisting homogenisation of one's own voice is crucial to creating the kind of variety that keeps society healthy. To do this, we must resist generative AI. Fin.

Fun fact. When Edsger W. Dijkstra, the famous Dutch computer science pioneer, was asked about his job during his marriage rite in 1957, he answered as "programmer". The municipal authorities did not accept it on the grounds that there was no such profession. Original post

The lone woman from #Piddington who is refusing to stand with racism has been doxxed by #PinkLadies and #TommyRobinson.

the wood wide web is so underrated, like trees literally paying mushrooms in sugar for gossip lol

British lament: why can’t we do the same with the Channel? It’s tiny compared to the Atlantic…

That's the Overton window moving. People always wanted to do this to RNLI, but now thanks to politicians and the media repeating what they say without question they feel empowered and entitled to do this

FOURTH THOUGHT OF THE DAY… If these creatures, and also those standing by watching it happen ever wondered what they would’ve done during the period of the Third Reich… They are doing it now‼️