Jon Machtynger

Cognitive scientist into cloud, psych, AI/Ethics, data, people dynamics & tech.

[Zac Goldsmith @ZacGoldsmith]

Thank God he didn’t apply a Snapchat bugs bunny filter to make fun of a politician

[Stephen Pollard @stephenpollard]

Here's my @spectator column about the BBC's payout to @imluciekon, 'The BBC can no longer ignore its antisemitism problem'

https://t.co/xSEt4I03pk

I don’t think I’ve ever been more wrong than when I was booed in a synagogue around twenty years ago. The occasion was a panel on media bias against Israel. One of the audience had asked a question about the BBC’s ‘institutional antisemitism’ and I responded – I shudder now to think how wrong I was – that while it was obviously biased against Israel, that reflected the left-liberal mindset of the overwhelming majority of its newsroom rather than antisemitism as such.

The years since the Hamas massacre on 7 October 2023 have been an object lesson in how wrong I was. The BBC’s reports have consistently repeated Hamas propaganda as fact, as with its international editor Jeremy Bowen’s coverage of the alleged bombing of a hospital in Gaza on 17 October that year. Hamas claimed an Israeli airstrike led to the blast, which it said killed at least 500 people. Bowen reported on BBC One’s News at Ten that: “The missile hit the hospital not long after dark. You can hear the impact. The explosion destroyed Al-Ahli hospital. It was already damaged from a smaller attack at the weekend. The building was flattened.”

In fact, the blast was caused by a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the hospital was entirely untouched and the damage was to a nearby car park. Bowen later accepted that he was “wrong” but “doesn’t regret one thing” about his reporting.

Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC television, has said that its repeated broadcasts of false reports mean that something deeper is at work than poor journalism: “Mistakes happen once, perhaps twice, but when they keep happening, you have to ask why. I think there are institutional biases.”

But those of us who are forced to pay for the BBC’s bias through the licence fee only see one side of this institutional antisemitism: its reporting. We don’t see the inner workings of its newsroom, the comments behind the scenes or – given that we are talking about institutional antisemitism – the way its Jewish employees are treated.

That changed today with the revelation that the BBC has paid out £400,000 to Lucie Kon. She is one of the most lauded documentary makers of her generation and an Emmy and Oscar winner – and also happens to be Jewish.

Kon’s account of her time at the BBC after the 7 October massacre is a devastating indictment. After she suggested making a film about the massacre, she was told that "if you want to call Hamas terrorists then you have to call Israel terrorists, too" and that she should "think about what drove Hamas to do what they did". The proposed film should "contextualise" the terrorist attack and empathise with what had driven the perpetrators. Then she was told that she should not oversee it because, as a Jew, she was "too partial" – in relation to a film about the murder, rape and mutilation of Israelis.

Colleagues told her that Zionists such as her are "evil". Kon says that after 7 October, "It was like having Jew stamped on my forehead". She says that a colleague told her it was "disgusting" that the then prime minister Rishi Sunak was visiting a Jewish school as prime minister to offer support and reassurance to the Jewish community. As she puts it: "I was open about being a Zionist. The BBC says, bring your authentic self to work. And I did. And I lost my job as a result."

After making a formal complaint, Kon was ordered to stay at home for months and then made redundant. The BBC has now paid her £400,000, although it has not admitted liability, apologised or accepted that she was the victim of antisemitism.

The problems with the BBC’s on-screen reporting do not come out of nowhere. Kon’s case is instructive because it is the first concrete example of what lies behind the bias in the BBC’s reporting: Jew hate. Much of the BBC’s output shows that its default position is that Israel is the real problem in the Middle East. It is hardly a surprise that behind the scenes, the view that Zionists are evil is considered uncontroversial.

One of the characteristics of antisemites is that they believe they are privy to the reality of the world – that Jews are the key to everything that is wrong. So they think they are merely stating the obvious when they say that Zionists are evil or that a Jew should not oversee a programme about a massacre of Jews.

Kon was a jewel in the BBC’s crown but was attacked by colleagues because she is a Jew. I have heard similar stories from other Jews who, for entirely understandable reasons, have decided to keep their head down, accept they work for an organisation in which open Jew hate flourishes, and get on with their job. But now that Lucie Kon has taken the courageous step of fighting the BBC’s institutional antisemitism, never again can it pretend the problem is not real – and raging.

[Etan Smallman @EtanSmallman]

The BBC tried to memory-hole Oscar and Bafta-winning producer @imluciekon - failing to include her Emmy in a list of its awards and re-editing her Oscar-winning documentary to remove her name from the "end board" of credits.

Astounding behaviour from a public broadcaster

[Oxford University Reform Society (OURS) @OxUniRFMSoc]

🚨 Statement on the invitation of Nathan Cofnas🚨

[Madeline Grant @Madz_Grant]

Jedi-trolling

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

I don’t want to post the video. You’ve all seen it. But I do want to write a love letter…

Dear everyone in Britain, ( even you illegals)

Just so you understand. The poppy is for the boys who never got to grow old. For the boys who were still somebody’s baby, brother, uncle or father. More than 600,000 of them.

It doesn’t matter if you support war, hate your country, think you are a woman (even though you are a man). It doesn’t matter which God you pray to, or if you pray to none at all.

It doesn’t matter who you vote for, what climate narrative you believe, or whether you believe Israel should exist or not!

The poppy isn’t for you!

It’s for those who came before. Those who fought for your right to be weird, annoying or even foreign.

The poppy is how we say thank you. Thank you for giving us time, peace and choice.

And attempting to ban our poppy by declaring it politically divisive isn’t a move towards freedom. It is an act of suppression. Understand that.

The poppy is about love and loss. For you!

So stick your rainbow flags and every other flag where the sun doesn’t shine and just wear your poppy. Those boys did not die as symbols. They died for you!

Did you know that poppies grew across the battlefields where so many fell? As though even the land refused to forget the blood once given to defend it.

So the poppy is for them. For those who came before us and paid in youth, in hope, in breath, in blood, so that we might have the freedom to be arseholes.

So that we might even have the freedom to fight over the ridiculous, the inconsequential and the insane.

Revere it, celebrate it and wear it. The very least you can do is that.

Best
The ordinary people.

[Jon Machtynger @synapticity]

@GadSaad @Cornell

[Jon Machtynger @synapticity]

@IonaItalia Keep it. A great thread

[How To Prompt @HowToPrompt__]

This paper answers why can’t you remember being a baby?

For over a century, science said you can't remember being a baby because your infant brain was just too "immature" to record anything. researchers assumed your hard drive was basically turned off for the first two years of life.

But this wild paper from Yale completely rewrites how we understand human memory..

Researchers literally put awake babies (between 4 and 25 months old) into an fMRI scanner to watch their brains process new visual experiences in real-time.

and what they found is mindblowing..

the infant hippocampus isn't turned off at all. it is actively firing, capturing, and encoding episodic memories. they proved that babies with higher hippocampal activity during a new experience formed a highly stable memory trace.

the babies are recording the data. the memory of your first birthday, your first steps, the exact layout of the room you slept in.. it was all successfully saved to your brain.

so why can't you remember it?

the paper concludes that infantile amnesia isn't an "encoding" problem.. it is a "retrieval" problem.

your brain recorded everything perfectly. but as you grew, your brain underwent massive developmental shifts, like explosive neurogenesis (the rapid birth of new neurons), which completely restructured your neural networks. the pathways to access those early files got buried or locked away.

you didn't fail to make the memories.. you just lost the encryption key to open them.

somewhere deep in your hippocampus, the exact first-person memory of being a 1-year-old might still be sitting there. you just can't access the file anymore..

the human brain is terrifyingly beautiful.

[Ian Austin @LordIanAustin]

I’d like to apologise.

The last week has finally made me understand that the real victims of the shocking rise in antisemitism are not Jewish people (and Jewish school children in particular) but Owen Jones, Sarah Helm and Sally Rooney.

I hope they’re ok and I’m very sorry for having got this wrong.

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

https://t.co/aHOHtb1rcW

[Roy Rogers Happy Trails Music Shop  @RoyRogers_HTMS]

This man just took the same plastic recorder that used to sound like a dying goose in elementary school and casually started shredding Sultans of Swing on it.
Eyes half-closed, fully committed, fingers flying like he actually practiced this instead of just surviving Hot Cross Buns.
Somewhere a music teacher is watching this and having an existential crisis. The recorder has seen things. It will never be
the same.

[Lady Laughingloudley @blah_blablather]

Let’s be clear:
If I’m not going to sleep with you, I don’t need to know anything about your sexuality.
And children—who are not going to sleep with anyone—certainly don’t.
Your sexuality is not sacred. It’s not a personality, it’s not a protected class of performance art, and it’s not the center of anyone’s moral universe but your own. Unless we are in a relationship, I am not obligated to acknowledge, affirm, or be exposed to your private desires—especially not in public, and especially not in front of children.
This used to be understood. Now it’s called hate.
No, We Don’t Owe You an Audience
Sexuality belongs in the private realm. It is intimate by definition. If you feel compelled to wear your kink on your sleeve—or on a float, or in a first-grade classroom—you are not inviting understanding, you are demanding submission. You are violating others’ right not to participate.
Consent doesn’t vanish because your fetish is “progressive.” If anything, the burden is higher.
No one consents to being flashed on the subway. No one consents to a stranger’s arousal. No one consents to a stranger telling their child about masturbation, kink, gender identity, or pornographic categories under the guise of “inclusive sex ed.” Yet all of this is happening now—in public parks, in classrooms, in televised programming.
It is not tolerance. It is invasion.
Children Are Not Here to Validate You
Children are not queer. Children are not sexual. Children do not need to “see themselves represented” in a spectrum of adult desire. This idea—that identity is only valid if sexualized and mirrored—is narcissism, not pedagogy.
There is no legitimate reason to initiate a child into the language of sexual preference, gender identity, or alternative lifestyles. The only people who benefit from that dynamic are those looking to normalize boundary violations.
Let me state it plainly:
Children who are not going to have sex do not need to be exposed to sexuality.
Period.
Any adult who insists otherwise is not confused. They are grooming.
Public Fetishism Is Not Liberation
There is a vast difference between being gay and demanding the right to simulate sex acts in front of children. Between being transgender and insisting on teaching kindergartners about breast removal. Between being proud of who you are and insisting the whole world observe your kink play in the street.
This is not diversity. This is decay.
Men in dog masks being walked on leashes by their lovers are not brave—they are forcing strangers into their psychodrama. This is exhibitionism, and when children are present, it becomes criminal exhibitionism.
We used to know this. Peeping, flashing, voyeurism—these were considered red flags. Dangerous behaviors. Early signs of escalation. Now they’re filmed, hashtagged, and funded by public grants.
Stop Calling It Love—It’s Entitlement
This is not about who you love. It’s about how you demand to be seen. If you need the entire public to witness, applaud, and adapt to your sexuality, you’re not a pioneer—you’re an emotional colonizer.
Love does not demand a captive audience. It does not parade past toddlers. It does not demand that schools teach four-year-olds about “preferred pronouns.” Love protects children. Love guards modesty. Love waits.
And if you can’t wait—if you need to be seen, affirmed, and obeyed—you’re not talking about love. You’re talking about power.
Consent Applies to Culture, Too
We teach children that consent is sacred—so why are we failing to apply that lesson to public life?
No child consents to drag queen story hour.
No parent consents to leather harnesses on city floats.
No woman consents to being exposed to male sexuality in the ladies’ room, or in the school library, or anywhere she cannot opt out.
Consent is not just for sex. It’s for everything.
Attention. Language. Presence. Ideology. Imagery.
And we are done pretending we don’t notice when it’s violated.
The boundary is back.
And we are drawing it in bold.

[Jon Machtynger @synapticity]

@DanielJHannan An issue with delaying gratification for a future reward in the UK (currently), is that plans based on future thinking are likely to be undermined by convoluted government 'initiatives'. Short-term gains outweigh long-term unpredictability.

[Jon Machtynger @synapticity]

@JohnCleese @TheAliceSmith This country "is no more", "has ceased to be", is "bereft of life, it rests in peace", and "is an ex-country"

[Andy Bryson @ifellonithonest]

Fuck off. Just fuck off with this brainless shit

[the original Grumpy Git @GitGrumpygit]

I can’t believe some fkn idiot has community noted this post … I’m actually choking with laughter

[FeelGoodThoughts @feelgoodtale]

The first time American physicist Richard Feynman went to Brazil, he usually ate outside of normal hours, so he was always the only customer at the restaurant

One day, while he was enjoying a plate of rice with meat, a Japanese abacuses vendor came in.
The vendor turned to the waiters and bet that he could add much faster than they could.

The waiters, who did not want to make a bad impression, invited him to speak to the only customer who was sitting alone in a corner.
"I don't speak Portuguese very well!" protested Feynman.

"It doesn't matter," laughed the waiters, "numbers are easy to understand." So they brought him a pencil and paper, and the challenge between the physicist and the street vendor began.

In adding numbers, Feynman was largely defeated.
And the situation did not change when they moved on to multiplication: this time, however, Feynman was defeated by a small margin, because he was quite good at multiplication.

At this point, the man suggested moving on to divisions, without realizing that the results with paper and pencil improved as the calculations became more complex: the more complicated the operation, the greater the chances Feynman had of winning.

And in fact they both performed a long division, and in the end they were tied.

Unable to bear to be beaten by an anonymous customer at the restaurant, the Japanese man exclaimed:

"Raios cubicos!". Cubic roots!
He wrote the number 1729.03 on a piece of paper and challenged the physicist to extract the cube root.
While the street vendor worked frantically, sweating blood, Feynman sat quietly doing nothing.
"What are you waiting for?" a waiter asked him.

"I think," the physicist replied, pointing to his forehead with a finger.
He wrote 12, shortly after 12.002 and then 12.0023 again.
Wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, the man with the abacus said, "12!"

"Oh, no! You need decimals!" Feynman replied, knowing full well that, when you extract a cube root with arithmetic, calculating decimals is quite tiring and the tiring increases decimal after decimal.

The Japanese dove back into the abacus and after a while, said, "12.0!" A paltry result compared to the numerous decimals found by the physicist.

Humiliated, the abacus seller walked away with his head down, leaving the waiters to gloat.

This is how Feynman had managed to beat the abacus champion.
"I knew that a cubic foot contains 1728 inches, so the result had to be a little more than 12. That left 1.03, about two thousandths of 1728. I had learned from calculating small fractions that the excess of the cube root is equal to one-third of the excess of the number itself. So I just had to find the value of the fraction 1/1728, multiply it by 4 (that is, divide by 3 and multiply by 12). In this way, I was able to calculate so many decimal places." If Feynman's explanation is not clear enough for you, know that he refers to the binomial expansion.

[Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1]

The replies to this 😂

[Alain Nahle | אלן נחלה 🇮🇱🇱🇧🕎 @nnahle]

Voici François-Louis Artois d’Hauteville, 15 ans, un jeune Français issu d’une ancienne lignée normande.

Il manifeste contre le manque de professeurs de philosophie dans son établissement — sa matière de prédilection. L’an dernier, un remplaçant a dû condenser en un seul semestre, à marche forcée, l’ensemble du programme consacré à Hegel et à Kant.

François a été le seul de sa classe à tenir le rythme : il avait déjà lu La Phénoménologie de l’esprit. Ses camarades, eux, peinaient à suivre, découvrant à peine cette œuvre en parallèle de la Critique de la raison pure.

Il a bien tenté de les aider après les cours, mais ces séances empiétaient sur ses engagements bénévoles dans une maison de retraite et sur ses leçons de violoncelle.

Voilà pourquoi, sur cette photo, il consulte sur son téléphone un cours consacré à la lecture des partitions et aux fondements de la musique classique.😇🇫🇷