Colin Mitchell

CTO/co-founder of agri-tech startup Sixty-5 Technologies Ltd, (@sixty5tech) hands-on code-tweaker, occasional blues guitarist

[Robert Wilkinson @robertwlk]

Just making some leek and potato soup. The recipe calls for four potatoes cubed is it me, or does sixty four potatoes seem an awful lot?

[Robert Wilkinson @robertwlk]

40 years ago today, l asked my childhood sweetheart, my best friend and the most gorgeous woman l know to marry me.

All three said no.

[Linda Thompson @LmetLinda]

Thought I was seeing things earlier today when I spotted Merchantman and Masterman tugs towing a SUBMARINE up Belfast Lough.

[Colin Mitchell @pixelpage]

Interesting to see that what Ed Zitron has been saying for some considerable time is now bubbling up to the mainstream.

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

OpenAI is absolutely cooked. This is loser language. You can’t be four years into the bubble saying “yeah our customers have a huge issue with how expensive our business is.” You just raised $122 billion! You can’t say shit like this!

https://t.co/1uKEEpSS03

[Climate Warrior🐬 #ClimateJustice🇵🇸🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 @ClimateWarrior7]

Stephen Hawking once tried to tell me about space.

I asked him when he was last in space, and he shamefacedly admitted he'd never been to space.

"You've never even been?" I said, taking care to draw out the "beeeen".

I suggested he should at least have the basic courtesy to visit space if he's going to talk about it.

Sadly he was a fake space expert, not a real space expert like Katy Perry and Jeff Bezos's wife.

[Anon Opin. @anon_opin]

The fatal flaw with democracy is that the skills required to convince people to vote for you are completely unrelated to the skills required to successfully run a country.

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

Went on Bloomberg - Anthropic and OpenAI are dangerous and unsustainable companies that shouldn’t IPO. The AI bubble is a con and retail investors are the marks.
AI doesn’t have ROI, it’s nothing like AWS/Uber, and it’s got no post-bubble recovery story.
https://t.co/ROww0H5ugs

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

People don't grasp the sheer speed and scale of Europe's decline.

This 👇 is an extraordinary number shared by Luis Vassy, director of Sciences Po (one of France's most famous schools) in this article: https://t.co/BQbkXb2kPl

He calculated that the EU is declining 3 times faster than the Qing dynasty at the height of China's century of humiliation.

Back then, it took China 50 years to drop from 30% of world GDP to 17%, whereas it took the EU just 17 years (from 2008 to 2025).

Insane 😢 And, sadly, given the current direction and the EU's systematically suicidal policy choices (latest example: https://t.co/6EYJgdXVVo), it's just the beginning...

[Miss Ally @MissAlly_01]

Looks like Westminster is having a clear out... 🤭

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

There is a strange development in which academics of international politics are expected to publicly condemn adversarial countries before they are allowed to participate in public discourse. The complexity of international politics is reduced to a moral question of good versus evil, and academics must make moral declarations before even discussing facts, history, strategy, and interpretations. Academics should explain why states behave as they do; they are not moral validators.

What value does it bring to an analysis if the analyst "condemns" one side? After Russia invaded Ukraine, the former Norwegian foreign minister actually argued that "this is not the time to understand, but to condemn". This ridiculous position is pushed on academics. However, understanding is not endorsement, explanation is not advocacy, and ignorance is not strength. I argue it is in Russia's security interest to push NATO away from its borders, it is in Iran's interest to control the Strait of Hormuz, and it is in China's interest to create a new international economic architecture. This is not advocacy, nor is it a normative position about how the world should work; rather, it is a recognition of how the world actually works.

An academic should examine interests, capabilities, and strategic calculations that produce such policies—not participate in ritualised declarations of virtue that contribute absolutely nothing. Furthermore, moralism and condemnation often lead to a lack of understanding and increased conflict. When the conclusion is always that the good guys are confronting the bad guys, then the solution is always "peace through strength", "weapons are the path to peace", and defeating the latest reincarnation of Hitler. If you want war, condemn the other side as pure evil. If you want peace, the first step is to understand the other side.

[Colin Mitchell @pixelpage]

The capacity of the Guardian to dredge up idiots continues unabated. https://t.co/boNv2DoJw3

[Collingwood 🇬🇧 @admcollingwood]

What I am about to say, I say as somebody who has sympathy with certain protectionist policies. Yet, if the below post describes the EU's plan accurately, it is bonkers and will cripple the EU economy over the long term. Sadly, however, the Atlanticist brigade are positioning themselves for when a Democrat returns to the White House, and rejoins Europe's effort to defeat Russia and Europe joins the US effort to defeat China. Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen, this path will lead to the ruination of Europe. Or, more likely, before it quite gets to that, the current EU-elite will be replaced with leaders possessed of more commonsense.

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

Free newsletter: The dawn of token-based billing has shown that generative AI doesn’t have a return on investment. It's too unpredictable, too unreliable, you can't easily measure the cost of tasks, and organizations are already pulling back.
https://t.co/wmI82zWdcq

[Colin Mitchell @pixelpage]

Looks like the Spectator has never heard of Edward Snowden lol

[The Spectator @spectator]

In 2014, Vladimir Putin notoriously described the internet as originally a ‘special project of the CIA’ that ‘is still developing as such’. He is also averse to mobile phones, not using or owning one himself and banning them from his offices.

These two concerns have come together in today's announcement by the Federal Security Service (FSB) that it had uncovered a massive ‘multi-level operation’ to hack the smartphones of Russian officials. The FSB's official announcement states that:.

Using the technical capabilities of large international IT corporations and mobile communications, representatives of foreign intelligence agencies carried out the covert, unauthorised collection of various types of information from the devices of cyberattack targets.

✍️ Mark Galeotti

Article | https://t.co/hKWYbkBb6Y

[Colin Mitchell @pixelpage]

@v_mccallum I live to spread joy and optimism

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Absolutely hilarious for the FT to argue the West is losing to China because "liberal market democracies operate with greater accountability to voters."

Hilarious and, of course, absurdly wrong. China is winning precisely because it's obsessively focused on delivering for its people: infrastructure, improving living standards, reducing poverty, etc.

"Liberal market democracies" are losing precisely because they forgot who democracies are supposed to be accountable to.

Src: https://t.co/tQjkt6OSg4

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

I can’t see you how you can possibly avoid using the term ethnic cleansing, without losing your last remaining shreds of integrity as a journalist, @adamparsons.

Lebanon's internal displacement rate is now 22.6 percent — more than one in five of its people. Over 1.2 million people, including 350,000 children, have been forced from their homes, with the IDF launching more than 1,840 attacks on Lebanon since March 2, killing more than 1,497 people and injuring more than 4,639.

Moreover, the language used by Israel Katz to describe his aims in Southern Lebanon is extraordinarily explicit and self-incriminating. He has confirmed that Israel's military would establish a permanent "security zone" inside Lebanon up to the Litani River, that hundreds of thousands of displaced residents would be "completely prevented" from returning, and that "all the houses in the villages adjacent to the border in Lebanon will be demolished in accordance with the Rafah and Beit Hanoun model in Gaza."

The targeting of civilians for displacement specifically identified by their religion (Shia), combined with the destruction of their homes to prevent return, combined with the explicit statement that they will not be permitted to return — these are precisely the elements that international law identifies as forcible transfer and ethnic cleansing. Human Rights Watch has said that "the displacement of the Shia population looks less like a temporary military necessity and more like a move to permanently displace the civilian population based on their religion."

Its not complex, Adam. You just haven't got the balls to say it straight, and that failure makes your reportage worse than worthless. It makes it morally bankrupt.

[Colin Mitchell @pixelpage]

What a load of complete nonsense. Still, it's perfect gung-ho militaristic fear-inducing fodder for the Guardian https://t.co/ww27ewbsr1