Observations on the world and its inhabitants
I had been working on slop. In previous work I found eleven patterns. Words, lists and stock phrases were caught by scripts. But something kept getting through. Text with no slop words still read like something delivered from a lectern, or as a report when none of that was required. This post will be of ...
Nobody hands you a manual for the mind. Go looking and you find a billion-pound industry on the shelves pretending otherwise. Here is a small everyday event but a manual here may not help. You see the sign in some shop: 80% off. The coffee machine, or the coat; it makes no difference. Before you ...
It is 17 January 1998. President Bill Clinton sits in a deposition in the Paula Jones civil case. A written definition of “sexual relations” has been placed before him. As narrowed by the judge, it states that a person engages in sexual relations when that person knowingly engages in or causes contact with the genitalia, ...
It is a reasonable assumption that people who have been through university should not make basic errors of thinking. They have been selected for ability, trained in a subject, and surrounded for years by argument, evidence, and criticism. History does not support the assumption. This article follows from Critical Thinking 2.0, in 2023. Educated people ...
I got a WhatsApp ping from a colleague: a BBC link, a dramatic headline, and a friendly warning — “Look after yourself if you eat egg.” Then “Eggs.. we feed them to our dogs.” I did what sensible people do: skimmed, sighed, and then read the piece properly. The headline had done its job. Me? ...
This follows from a recent post on the limitations of AI models. In this article – based on a real situation – the AI seems to confess, express remorse and self-awareness. But is it that. The confession sounds good but how is it that an AI model can do that? What follows is the confession ...
1. Purpose This brief governs the use of an AI language model to analyse documents and produce a faithful written account of it. It is designed for judgments, inquiry reports, and similar primary documents where accuracy of representation is paramount. There can be no guarantee that it will work for every situation or work with ...
In a reflective and uniquely structured article the narrative is told from the perspective of an artificial intelligence analysing its own interaction with a human user. The piece serves as a profound exploration of epistemology, cognitive blind spots, and the structural vulnerabilities inherent in human-AI collaboration. 1. The Opening Frame I am an AI model. ...
Section 1: The Challenge of Interpretive Texts Policy documents, legal texts, and regulatory instruments share a common feature: they are dense, layered, and conditional. A single provision may depend on a definition found elsewhere. That definition may itself contain exceptions or cross-references. The result is a text that is difficult to hold in working memory ...
A question landed in a WhatsApp group the other day. Simple enough. What is one divided by zero? One person answered at once. Undefined. That is the textbook answer. It is what a calculator, mathematician or the internet tells you. Clean, final, no fuss. Someone else paused. They looked at the question a different way. ...
Mono no aware o shiru hito (物の哀れを知る人) means, literally, “a person who knows the poignancy of things” — but the knowing it encapsulates is of a different kind. It is not knowledge from books or doctrine; it is knowing the way one knows grief, or a friend’s face — by acquaintance, not by information. Nor ...
There are few things more unsettling than the idea that something unwanted has taken up residence inside your body. Microplastics have crossed from environmental concern to deeply personal intrusion, and the headlines have followed. Fragments in lung tissue. Particles in blood. Traces in the placenta. The reporting oscillates between quiet alarm and outright panic, and ...
This article examines a brief, everyday exchange on a WhatsApp to identify a common cognitive pattern: the treatment of internal, subjective states as if they were objective, external facts, and the use of that false equivalence to justify decisions or behaviours. The analysis draws out key points about the gap between perception and reality, a ...
On 13 May 1997, just two weeks after the general election that swept Tony Blair into power, Jeremy Paxman interviewed the former Home Secretary Michael Howard on BBC Newsnight. The subject was the dismissal of Derek Lewis, the Director General of the Prison Service, following a security breach at Parkhurst prison. The central allegation: that ...
You are a senior executive. You warn the board that the company is taking risks that could break it. You are ignored. You warn again. Then you are dismissed. A document is placed before you: a Settlement Agreement. It offers you a payment. In exchange, you must waive your right to bring any employment tribunal ...
Is AI intelligence a real thing? That sounds like a philosophical question — the kind discussed over coffee, not the kind that shapes public policy. But right now, governments are spending billions on the assumption that the answer is “yes.” AI is being deployed in health services, legal advice, welfare decisions, and increasingly, mental health ...
In this blog post there is a fictional account of what Mork might report on ‘the humans’. Some are too young to recall who is Mork. In 1978, a wild-haired comedian named Robin Williams played a one-off alien on an episode of Happy Days. The character, Mork from the planet Ork, was so popular it ...
The High-Mileage Dilemma There is a specific kind of internal negotiation that happens when you own a car with 123,000 miles on the clock. My Citroën C4 Grand Picasso has been a faithful servant, but the years and the motorways haven’t been kind to its face. The bonnet was a constellation of stone chips, the ...
Every so often, a news item emerges that is so far outside the usual bandwidth of public discourse that it forces a pause, even among those who pride themselves on scepticism. A recent article, circulating through mainstream aggregators, asserts that extraterrestrial intelligences may be on the brink of openly confirming their existence. The claim is ...
The Rotten lemon Back in 2022, when Elon Musk finally closed the deal on Twitter for a staggering $44 billion, the world didn’t just frown; it did a collective spit-take. Wall Street analysts were calling it the “overpayment of the century”, and honestly, they had a point. Musk was paying $54.20 per share for a ...
In December 2008, a minor archaeological excavation in Shangsi County, Guangxi, southern China, produced a mystery that should have been forgotten within a fortnight. Instead, it has lingered for nearly two decades—not because the mystery was solved, but because it was never properly resolved. In that unresolved space, something interesting happened to the human mind. ...
We’ve had a busy month in the business of measuring “Humanity.” Between the release of Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE) and the interactive bloodbath that was ARC-AGI-3, it’s becoming clear that we aren’t exactly building a new mind. We’re building a $600 billion filing cabinet that’s learned how to speak with a slight academic sneer. The ...
The evening light was still strong at half past five. The New Forest in July holds its warmth long into the evening, and the path that led from the open heath into the trees was warm underfoot, the air carrying the particular stillness that settles before birdsong shifts register. The Mad Doctor had been walking ...
It is tempting to talk about COVID as if it were a chapter we have closed. A horrible few years, then a return to “normal”. But that framing feels increasingly wrong to me. The pandemic was not only an acute crisis; it was a forcing function that pushed institutions, companies, and individuals into rapid adaptation. ...
Digital newspaper pricing usually follows a race-to-the-bottom logic, with publishers vying for volume in a saturated attention economy. However, recent data from the Caribbean reveals a counter-intuitive trend: a high-margin, aggressive pricing strategy that appears to decouple local news from the domestic economy. This analysis examines the pricing trajectory of the Trinidad Express and compares ...
I undertook this because on trying to login to CPanel – a portal from where I manage my websites – I was getting logouts and messages saying “Your IP Address has changed” after a few seconds of logging in. There was actually no apparent change of my IP Address or one that I could see. ...
We have all been there. You are halfway through typing “I hope this email finds you well” for the fourteenth time since breakfast, and for a split second, you actually forget how to spell “well.” Like wut! It happens to people. Or perhaps you are staring at a blinking cursor, trying to remember if your ...
Espanso is a free, open-source text expander that works across Windows, macOS and Linux. Most guides cover the basics — type a trigger, get some text. This guide goes further, covering features that turn Espanso from a simple text replacer into a genuinely powerful productivity tool. For those to want to save the drudgery of ...
Most of us spend our lives fighting with our keyboards. We have these thoughts—medical observations, legal arguments, complex lines of code—but the physical act of typing it out over and over feels like a tax on our time. When I first looked at Espanso, I almost closed the window. It looked like a wall of ...
There is a deceptively simple question buried beneath much of everyday human behaviour: should a person spend personal time reading, viewing, or thinking about matters over which they have no control or influence? Approached literally, the answer dissolves into a fog of individual variables — personality, education, culture, neurological development, social circles, and a dozen ...
