Friday 26 June, 2026

Café life Quote of the Day ”Criticism and Bolshevism have one thing in common. They both seek to pull down that which they could never build.” Noel Coward Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Abdullah Ibrahim | Little Boy Link Long View of the Day If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video might be worth a million. I could have generated a transcript of this video by Hannah Fry, a Cambridge professor, which provides the most useful and accessible explanation I’ve come across of why AI ‘agents’ might be both the smartest AND most worrying things we’ve ever invented. But I think the video conveys the message more cogently than text. It really made me think because I had downloaded OpenClaw but had held back from using it to build autonomous agents because (i) I couldn’t think of an application that would be both genuinely useful (for me) and (ii) safe. It’s still sitting there, looking at me reproachfully. My commonplace booklet Lovely piece of satire by Private…