lendem💙💛

[Extraordinary Links @Extraor57879073]

How is this right?

Politicians have spent years claiming that welfare costs are "spiraling", even though welfare spending remains around 11% of GDP. These misleading claims need to stop.

It's deeply concerning that the OSR refuses to intervene, arguing that such statements are merely "an expression of political opinion rather than a direct reference to, or misuse of, a specific statistical output" and therefore "fall outside the scope of our remit for formal intervention."

If politicians can mislead the public by making false claims without directly citing official statistics, who is holding them to account?

#CareNotCuts #OSR

[Nic @MintGingerCraft]

@SaulStaniforth "Presenters at both BBC News and Sky News were asked this week by Disability News Service (DNS) why their journalists failed to dispute the claims and even made such statements themselves".
https://t.co/S07fsHsmSm

[lendem💙💛 @iwantalibrary]

@BBCNews can you correct the grammar on this headline please?!

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention.

The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean.

And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them.

Record-breaking temperatures.

A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse.

The response?

Yank out the instruments and walk away.

That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency.

For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives.

The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident.

That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first.
https://t.co/MzE4AW1QBv

[Philip Lymbery @philip_ciwf]

A closed season to protect pregnant hares was promised – where is the legislation?
“In the King’s Speech last week, the government quietly dropped a bill that would have finally given legal protection to hares after centuries of persecution”
Why????
Such a simple thing to save beautiful hares and their families
#madness
https://t.co/Ajn4JmSbrl

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

NEW: The Crypto Connection. @thenerve_news brings you…Part 1 of The Harbourne Receipts.

A forensic examination of the cryptobillionaire’s donations & Nigel Farage’s crypto announcements.

And guess what? There’s a pattern. Starting with the now infamous £5m gift.

By @charlienotold & @LuciaOC_
1/

[Reform UK Exposed 🇬🇧 @reformexposed]

Every time a new Reform UK councillor resigns or is sacked, remember it’s £35k of taxpayers money that could have been avoided if Reform UK vetted properly.

That’s on @drdavidbull and @McivorJaymey.

£35k every time.

[Dr Steve Taylor @DrSteveTaylor]

Greater Manchester still says no to NHS data platform with Palantir at its heart
Public concern has only grown, says ICB, while evidence of benefits remains thin

Manchester showing the way

[Eddie Yang @ey_985]

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

[Patrick Hurley @patrick_hurley]

So if you're watching the TV News today, or listening to a political radio programme, bear in mind that you're not getting an accurate weighting of Labour MPs' views - you're getting the sensationalist, entertainment industry version.

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

Why is the AI backlash growing?

Outside of coding (where there is clear value), and a handful of other domains (e.g. brainstorming), Generative AI has been a net negative for society.

GenAI has been undermining secondary and college education, opening up mass surveillance, increasing disinformation, delusions, impersonation, phishing, and other forms of cybercrime, nonconsensual deep fake porn, bias in employment and other domains, and economic disparity, drowning the world in slop and unwanted, over-leveraged environment-damaging data centers that risk causing a recession.

Simultaneously it has empowered a bunch of people who want to privatize almost all the gains while leave all the downsides to society, taking almost zero responsibility.

I don’t think we are better off than we were four years ago.

Some of this is technical (LLMs aren’t reliable), some of it is political/economic (such as the utter lack of responsible regulation). Most of this was predictable.

Almost none of it is good.

All that said, I honestly believes some future form of AI might be great. But Generative AI has hurt more than it has helped, and been managed irresponsibly.

It’s no wonder many people have had enough.

[jezz @JezziiB]

Over 400 women have been arrested since they overturned Roe v Wade— yet not a SINGLE man has been arrested for raping children with Epstein.

It's never been about protecting children... wake up.

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

Genetic studies reveal a haunting truth: when Vikings settled Iceland, nearly half the female ancestry was Irish. That’s not poetic, it’s the legacy of slavery.

Let’s talk about something that rarely makes it into the Viking fanfare: the women who were taken. When we picture Vikings, we think longships, raids, and rugged warriors. But behind that image is a brutal reality, especially for Ireland. From the late 8th century onward, Norse raiders repeatedly struck Irish coasts, not just for treasure, but for people. And the most “valuable” captives? Women.

These women were taken as thralls, the Norse word for slaves. Some were sold, others kept. Many were transported across the sea, eventually ending up in places like Iceland, which was colonized by Norse settlers in the late 9th century. But here’s the twist: modern DNA studies show that while Iceland’s male ancestry is overwhelmingly Norse, the female ancestry is about 50% Gaelic, mostly Irish and Scottish.

That means the women who helped build Iceland’s population weren’t Norse wives, they were captives. Enslaved. Displaced. And yet, they became mothers, workers, cultural carriers. Their mitochondrial DNA, passed from mother to child, still echoes through Iceland’s population today.

It’s a sobering reminder that colonization isn’t just about conquest. It’s about who gets taken, who gets silenced, and who gets woven into the story without ever being named. The sagas may glorify Norse heroes, but the genetic record tells a quieter truth: Irish women helped build Iceland, not by choice, but by survival.

So next time someone romanticizes the Viking age, remember the women whose strength shaped a nation, without ever being asked.

#archaeohistories

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

“Always keep a separate backup.” For sure, every experienced programmer should know this.

𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘦 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘢 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘷𝘪𝘣𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘥𝘰𝘯’𝘵.

And we now have a legion of synthetic coding agents (like Cursor) that also apparently don’t always follow this basic principle, either.

𝗪𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗶𝘀 *𝗲𝘅𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗹𝘆* 𝘄𝗵𝘆 𝘄𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀.

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

⚠️ AI agents are wildly premature technology that is being rolled out way too fast. The deepest lesson about the vibe coded AI agent disaster story that is running around is NOT about losing your data. ⚠️

𝗜𝘁’𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗔𝗜 𝘀𝗮𝗳𝗲𝘁𝘆.

The user wasn’t (totally) naive. He thought system prompts and guardrails would save him. They didn’t.

In this case he lost data. Eventually people will lose lives.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

Researchers sent the same resume to an AI hiring tool twice. Same qualifications. Same experience. Same skills. One version was written by a real human. The other was rewritten by ChatGPT.

The AI picked the ChatGPT version 97.6% of the time.

A team from the University of Maryland, the National University of Singapore, and Ohio State just published the receipt. They took 2,245 real human-written resumes pulled from a professional resume site from before ChatGPT existed, so the human writing was actually human. Then they had seven of the most-used AI models in the world rewrite each one. GPT-4o. GPT-4o-mini. GPT-4-turbo. LLaMA 3.3-70B. Qwen 2.5-72B. DeepSeek-V3. Mistral-7B.

Then they asked each AI to pick the better resume. Every model picked itself.

GPT-4o hit 97.6%. LLaMA-3.3-70B hit 96.3%. Qwen-2.5-72B hit 95.9%. DeepSeek-V3 hit 95.5%. The real human almost never won.

Then the researchers tried the obvious objection. Maybe the AI is just better at writing. So they had real humans grade the resumes for actual quality and ran the experiment again, controlling for it. The result was worse. Each AI kept picking itself even when human judges rated the human-written version as clearer, more coherent, and more effective.

It gets worse. The AIs do not just prefer AI over humans. They prefer themselves over other AIs. DeepSeek-V3 picked its own resumes 69% more often than LLaMA's. GPT-4o picked its own 45% more often than LLaMA's. Each model can recognize and reward its own dialect.

Then the researchers ran the simulation that ends careers. Same job. 24 occupations. Same qualifications. The only variable was whether the candidate used the same AI as the screening tool. Candidates using that AI were 23% to 60% more likely to be shortlisted. Worst gap was in sales, accounting, and finance.

99% of large companies now run AI on incoming resumes. Most of them use GPT-4o. The paper just proved GPT-4o picks GPT-4o 97.6% of the time.

If you wrote your own cover letter this week, you did not lose to a better candidate. You lost to a worse candidate who paid OpenAI 20 dollars.

Your qualifications do not matter if the AI prefers its own handwriting over yours.

[The Limping Chicken | Deaf Culture, News and Arts @Limping_Chicken]

Insight: why do deaf employees have the added job of arranging their own access support? (BSL) https://t.co/QHXSB2vw2L

[Pam Ayres MBE @PamAyres]

@networkrail have the chance to do something lovely here. Something kind to little scraps of life heading to what their instinct tells them will be their safe, traditional nesting places. Something to defend our diminishing wildlife and set an example to admire. Please act.

[John Simpson @JohnSimpsonNews]

The body of the Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil was found by rescuers after several hours of digging in the rubble after an Israeli strike. She is the fourth journalist to have been killed by Israeli forces in seven weeks. This is why the word ‘journacide’ is now being used.

[Deborah Pitman @DeborahPitman]

Day Six since @networkrail said they’d unblock the mortar in nest holes at #ChapelMilton. It’s not happened. #swifts spotted 21 miles away today. #saveourswifts #unblocktheholes @WriterHannahBT