I’ve just accepted a position to study for my PhD in philosophy at the University of Leeds, based at IDEA: The Ethics Centre. I start in October. I’ll be researching whether deception and manipulation are morally acceptable in AI-authored design.Aside from occasional, staccato projects where time allows, I won’t be taking on new consulting work from autumn. Thanks to my clients for taking the time to think through ethical and responsible technology together; the industry needs more folks like…

The British Academy has announced the selection of 92 new fellows, and four philosophy professors are among them. The British Academy Building in London They are: Béatrice Longuenesse (New York University) Richard Pettigrew (University of Bristol; University of Oxford as of October 2026) Nicholas Shea (Institute of Philosophy, University of London) James Warren (University of Cambridge) Fellows are selected “in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the humanities and social…

Last post mentioned that a medieval illustrator indicated a physician by showing him holding a flask. There was a very specific substance in that flask, and it wasn't blood; it was urine. Blood's color rarely looked different from person to person or ailment to ailment, but urine could be different in many ways.I talked about a book all about urine a few years ago, but let's get into some more detail now.Medieval physicians saw at least 20 different visual cues in urine when assessing a…

Recent links… Aphantasia, Hume, and empiricism — some people seem to lack mental imagery, and this has philosophical implications, argue Uku Tooming & Roomet Jakapi Are philosophers who work for AI firms “arsonists who moonlight as firefighters”? — Hollis Robbins on humanity, “My Fair Lady”, and why “neither the world nor the AIs will become more moral” from the work of AI’s philosophers “For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. If you wanted to know how you should act, you…

Ed Zitron has a new epic post out, massive post out at Where's Your Ed at? To be honest, it's probably a bit much unless you've already fallen deep into the AI bubble rabbit hole. New comers may want to start with his Better Offline podcast where he regularly talks with some of the sharpest AI bubble skeptics Cal Newport, Paul Kedrosky, and Carl Brown. He has also has become a fixture on shows like On the Media (an interview from last year. OTM was characteristically early to the story) and…

This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:1: ACX grantee Trevor Klee is looking for subjects for a study of his NeutraOat product, meant to protect against PFAS “forever chemicals”. Although this sounds like RFKslop, there’s decent evidence that these are…

Sometimes we see very senior Vaiṣṇavas — devotees who go back to the roots of ISKCON, with decades of steady service, and sādhana — still struggling in various ways in their twilight years of Krishna consciousness. They sometimes even question their taste for the holy name, or struggle, and temporarily fall. The doubt then naturally arises: “If even such long-standing practitioners have these problems, does the process of bhakti-yoga even work?” This post is dedicated to answering that…

It’s been an interesting few weeks for counterexamples. This post is basically my perspective of what has been going on in the world of formalization, AI tools and, in particular, counterexamples. Unit distance Two months ago today (20th May 2026), ChatGPT disproved Erdős’ Unit Distance conjecture in discrete geometry. This is now old news but I had to start somewhere. The announcement was accompanied with testimonies by human mathematicians, many of whom I knew and a few of whom I trusted,…

Streetnames by Elo is a fascinating interactive map which colours streets according to how highly the internet rates the people, places or things they are named after. The map combines OpenStreetMap's `name:etymology:wikidata` tags with EloEverything's crowd-sourced Elo rankings to create a surprisingly revealing view of the world's street names.EloEverything asks users to choose which of two

There is a particular kind of essay that business audiences have been reading for over twenty years now. It observes that the Code of Hammurabi put builders to death for shoddy work; it observes that modern bankers are paid bonuses for taking risks that other people bear; it concludes that we have forgotten something the Babylonians knew, and that we would do well to remember it.I have written exactly that type of essay. I wrote it some years ago and never published it, which turns out to have…

Being passionate and enthusiastic about psychedelics – or even evangelical about them – can sometimes lead to seeing their influence everywhere. When you spend a lot of time thinking about these substances, as well as using them, it’s as if the world becomes more psychedelic; nature becomes more alive, and you imagine how things would… The post Psychedelic Apophenia: Seeing the Influence of Psychedelics Where None Exists appeared first on Sam Woolfe.

You have to love brain twisters like this. Apparently, from all the videos online it is something many others like as well. More on the Channel and good Dune info. More

In summer 1999, a kid could whisper “I see dead people,” and every person in the room knew exactly what he meant. That is what a movie actually is. It’s not content; it’s never content. It’s actually closer to a coordination technology - a machine for getting millions of nervous systems to fire in sync.In this video, I take on the “everyone will just prompt their own movies” prediction. The people making it understand the models, the costs, and the timelines. What they miss is a category error:…

Chuck Tingle did a “reading” at the Internet Archive this week, and I had to write about it. Chuck writes erotica, horror, and comedy books with titles like Space Raptor Butt Invasion and Pounded in the Butt by My Handsome Sentient Library Card Who Seems Otherworldly but in Reality Is Just a Natural Part of the Priceless Resources Our Library System Provides. I haven’t read any of his books yet, but I can’t help loving Tingle’s online personality. The event was high-energy and packed with…

"[The young British] see standards as inhibiting. I see them as defining. They see tradition as deadening. I see it as nourishing. It may be that, as an American, I idealize the British situation. But I hope not as absurdly as they idealize ours. In 1959 I gave a talk on mass culture at a Universities & Left Review forum in London. I expected the audience, which was much younger than I, to object to my lack of enthusiasm for socialism, though it was distressing to find them still talking about…

Here's a fact-check and insight into reality TV exclusivity deals—and why NBCUniversal's casting executive is actually fine with allowing their talent to go on Dancing with the Stars.

A new edition of the Internet Phone Book is in the works, and co-publishers Elliot Cost, and Kristoffer Tjalve (also a Tiny Awards organiser), recently spoke about the esteemed directory on the Wonders of Web Weaving podcast. There are a ton of podcasts out there, but I take time out to tune in to Wonders of Web Weaving, hosted by James’ Coffee Blog, when a new show is posted. Production is refreshingly straightforward and stripped back. Absent are ads, the seeming requisite chessy/generic…

This is either very good, or very bad, depending on where you're sitting or standing, on the LLM-generated art divide. ::chuckle:: [ day in progress... ]

This is a recap-ish of the latest podcast episode. You can listen to the episode below before or after you read. That’s because I tend to expand on topics from the pod as well as straight-up write about things that we did not discuss. The choice is yours in how you want to proceed! Hello, my friends! You know, it’s hard to come back to real life after you’ve had a great vacation, especially one that took you to Japan. Now, instead of fantastic menswear stores stocking items in my taste or…

A particular type of loot that you will only find in the Barony. The jacket is the most important part of Baronial dress and custom, and a properly tailored and fitted jacket made with expensive materials is the quickest way to signal your social standing to a crowd of Baronials. They are mostly cut square-shouldered, and typically flat to the body (one of the reasons many Baronial women bind their chests). A dizzying profusion of fabrics, worked ornamentation, and stitching, collaring,…

Athas is a world without true gods, however, they look at calling on miracles from the elements or from spirits of the land. The Priest Hero-Path introduces new Spheres of the Elements, which replaces the Elementalist Circle of Sorcery from EZD6 Core. Spheres of the ElementsBolts of elemental energy fired at a target inflict one strike (or two if they are susceptible to this element). They also cause an additional effect depending on their sphere. They can create elemental effects, that require…

Let’s say you had to select which higher education (depending on where you live in the world, sometimes known as college, university, or tertiary education) you would attend, as you’re about to complete secondary school (also known as high school or pre-university education). Looking back on your current life, would you choose a different college from the one you graduated from? I may have, as not only might my current life be different, but many things have changed since then. This is all…

It seems obvious that social media have drastically changed how photographers engage with the internet. In fact, for many people — photographers as much as the rest of the population — social media are the internet: this is where you either spend most of your time, or they provide the one jump-off point to whatever else is available online. As a blogger, my view of social media has always been extremely critical. Early on, social media all but destroyed the very vibrant community of bloggers,…

John Wyver writes: Something of a catch-up today, and even so my posting is both late and melancholy. The past few weeks have been somewhat consumed by The Cultures of Early Television conference, and only now am I getting back to the blog and a selection of Sunday links. I’ll aim to do better going forward, but here are pointers to stuff that has engaged and interested, and it has to be said saddened me recently. No Andy B and no AI, or only glancingly, but those are topics to which we’ll most…

The following are questions from restaurant operators, consultants, journalists, and consumers about restaurants generally, dating from 1900 into the early 2000s. Many of those that I’ve chosen particularly reflect and represent the industry and the times. Prominent among the questions are those concerning race, modernization, and automation. There are also some that are reflections about what’s been lost over time. The questions with capitalization are headlines. Sorry no illustrations — I’m…

Balaji represents the quintessential enemy - a parasitic leech who has built his trade not on the expansion of genuine infrastructure or extrastatecraft mastery but hyperfinacial vaporwave and LinkedIn vibes. The Network State in principle has much that one can discern and learn from but in reality and practically it is a front for American Imperial machination akin to the establishment of American Universities across the MENA region in the 20th century. A metastatic cancer that seeks to…

It is necessary to address anthropomorphism and here is the best place to do so since I'm musing on bovines for my other writing. I was called a 'f*cking cow' by a dear friend in 2011, celebrating the publication of my first book about tea - 'Distinguished Leaves - poems for tea-lovers'. No one accused me of anthropomorphism when each tea turned into a character with human characteristics. Back to the cow. I had and have no qualms about being insulted - it was the result of arrogance on my part…

Namier concluded, the first thing to do was to realize that high-flown speeches and even public documents were largely window dressing. The crucial factors were the personal histories of the players--the families they came from, the deals they had made to get elected, the goals they held for their own careers and later lives. Focusing on the rhetoric was essentially a waste of time. link here

Generative AI doesn’t generate information; it generates words. – Hannah Cyrus This very impressive cover was called to my attention by Radley Balko, who also supplied “pope”. The other links above the video were provided by Mike Siegel; Tracy Quan; Ryan Marino and Stephen Lemons; Nun Ya; IncarcerNation; and Mike Masnick, in that order. Metaphor alert. Librarians vs. slop generators. R.I.P. Martha Ann Lillard and Louise Lasser. Maggie admitted to herself, “I like this pope”. Good riddance to…

Right after a session. “Your problems don’t sound so bad to me,” the therapist said. Two hours later he was swinging from a rope.