Publisher. Writer. RSA Fellow. Known locally as that bloke with Luna. “You who do not know how the mind is joined to the body know nothing of the works of God."
Joined April 2009
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'Search and rescue'
Purdue University's IDEAS Lab built an autonomous drone that tracks runners through dense forests completely without GPS or cloud networks.
By running 3D LiDAR mapping and obstacle-avoidance AI entirely on-chip, it can weave under tree canopies and predict target movement through blind spots in real time.
Massive implications for next-gen search & rescue and edge AI.
Mark Eltringham retweeted
‘The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time’
- Philip Larkin
The Party of Hope
“Be ready by having some everyday essentials… three litres of water per person per day, tinned goods... to last a few days”
Speaking to @vicderbyshire, Defence Secretary Wes Streeting details advice to households to be prepared for a “dangerous and turbulent world”.
#Newsnight
Mark Eltringham retweeted
If you wonder what you would have done if you lived through the rise of the Nazis in Germany and its growing persecution of its Jews:
You're doing it now.
Mark Eltringham retweeted
Jonathan Powell was not vetted before being appointed National Security Adviser, we can report.
spectator.com/article/reveal…
Mark Eltringham retweeted
COMPUTER SAYS PAY
HMRC is set to get powers to take unpaid tax straight from people's bank accounts, @thetimes reports.
Postmasters were once told a computer proved they owed money. It didn't.
Who checks HMRC's figures before the money goes? @HMRCgovuk
EXCLUSIVE from @oliver_wright
People who fail to pay their tax bill will find the money taken directly from their bank accounts under new powers to be given to HMRC at the budget
In an attempt to recover up to £4bn of small unpaid debt John Healey, the chancellor, will announce that HMRC will have the authority to automatically deduct money from current and savings accounts when they fail to engage with the taxman
It is the latest move to close Britain’s £60bn tax gap — the difference between the amount of tax that should in theory be paid to HMRC and the amount that is collected
At present HMRC has limited powers to take money directly from taxpayers without their consent
The tax authorities can only take money from bank accounts if it would leave someone with at least £5,000 remaining after the debt had been recovered and if the debt owed is more than £1,000
But ministers are concerned that the high threshold means a significant number of taxpayers are deliberately ignoring HMRC demands for money in the knowledge that the taxman is unlikely to come after them
Under the new rules HMRC will be given powers to automatically deduct instalment payments from people with lower-value debts who persistently do not engage with the taxman. The threshold for debt recovery will be lowered to as little as a few pounds and the deductions could also include repaying fines and interest
thetimes.com/uk/politics/art…
Never mind a ban. That should be permanent as a given. The police need to be involved.
CERDYN COCH 🟥
Cerdyn coch i Curtis Gregory am chwarae brwnt.
Ebbw Vale are down to 14 players for the rest of the game.
@llandoveryrfc @evrfc
💻 youtube.com/@S4CChwaraeon
#SRC | @SuperRygbiCymru
For years it's been obvious that the number one piece of transfer business United should do is to sell this bugger
Don’t care where you stand on Carrick or the staff, your club captain doing this after a result like that absolutely reeks.
Bruno Fernandes is the captain of Manchester United. You can question his performances, his body language, whatever you want, but for him to come out and publicly call this out tells you all you need to know.
Genuine piece of trash behaviour. Disgusting, actually.
Mark Eltringham retweeted
Spectacular Nature piece on why AI is not conscious and probably will never be.
Three arguments:
1) Intelligence is not consciousness.
Intelligence is about solving problems. Consciousness is about having subjective experiences.
AlphaFold can solve super difficult problems. By contrast, our brains performs complex operations entirely outside awareness.
Problem-solving and consciousness are two separate things.
2. Biology is essential.
Our brains are alive, down to every cell. Their activity is inseparable from the living tissue that produces it.
The idea that consciousness can be reproduced simply by running the right computations on silicon components who do not fight for their life is a very far fetching and, I would add, almost religious, assumption.
3) The physical organization may matter more than the computation.
According to integrated information theory, consciousness requires specific causal relationships between a system’s physical components.
The computer architectures running today’s AI lack this organization.
The comparison with AlphaFold is particularly revealing:
Almost nobody things AlphaFold is conscious, despite its inner working is very similar to an LLM
Why?
Because it does not speak.
LLMs do speak like us and therefore we fall into an illusion:
Since they speak like us, they must be like us.
But this inference is wrong.
LLMs are just a series of matrix multiplications.
They are not conscious, and they will never be.
*
Paper in the first reply
I can confirm this.
Young people actively hate AI.
My two younger daughters are 19 and 18, both at universities - one in the UK the other in Italy. Through them, I happen to know quite a few kids their age.
And ALL OF THEM seem to universally hate AI.
To them it's "something old people invented that we now have to deal with... as if climate change wasnt enough"
AI is cringe. When they introduce me to their friends, they literally say "heyya, meet my dad, he's a software engineer but nonono, NOT IN AI, dont worry, hahah".
They hate it for flooding their social feeds with slop, ruining music, taking phone scams to the next level, also destroying careers & devaluing their hobbies - why become an architect, this skill is about to become worthless? Why learn a musical instrument if session musicians are already obsolete?
The outcome is interesting, though - they're spending less and less time on public social, meeting up IRL, moving their online lives into private group chats with actual verified friends. TikTok and Reels are increasingly cringe-something for old dudes.
Which, I guess, might be a net positive after all...
Mark Eltringham retweeted
Evil detests beauty because beauty is proof of a transcendental order, of objective Goodness and Truth.
To attack beauty is to wage war against the possibility of transcendence.
Beauty is a great affront to nihilism. It testifies to that which is greater than the individual, because to create a beautiful thing is to acknowledge that you are answerable to standards higher than your own. Beauty is often called a great evangelist for this reason.
This is why they outright destroy beauty or try to subvert your perception of it by promoting ugliness or triviality. Beauty is neither neutral nor trivial — your ability to discern the beautiful from the ugly is intimately connected to your capacity to recognize the divine.
Dietrich von Hildebrand once declared that "beauty is the archenemy of mediocrity." Why?
Beauty elevates a person toward truth, goodness, and the divine. The antitheses to beauty drag the soul down into nihilism and worship of the self.
Mark Eltringham retweeted
New: Accenture has told employees it will only fund $29 per month of Claude use. Meaning that employees who often spend as much as $1,000 a month are now scrambling to find ways to keep access to the tool. A sign of the continuing crack down of AI 404media.co/accenture-tells-…
I read this when it came out and had a number of discussions about it with friends. Whenever I read or hear opinions I wonder when the person holding them last spoke to somebody working class.
This was an illuminating read.
The intellectual life or "high culture" was never something that only the elites enjoyed.
In England, there has long existed a widespread, self-directed culture of education among the working class. Coal miners in industrial England read voraciously, many of them self-studying history or even Latin after long shifts underground.
Rose overturns the assumption that the working classes of industrial Britain were largely uneducated or intellectually disengaged. Miners and mill workers in fact built personal libraries and formed societies to study Shakespeare, Dickens, Milton, even Plato.
While elites might have consumed culture for status, ordinary readers engaged with it morally and personally. They saw in Shakespeare and the classics a means of moral development and self-mastery — this revelation directly challenges the 20th-century academic assumption (inspired by postmodernism and Marxist cultural studies) that "high culture" is inherently exclusionary.
Pulling from autobiographies and letters, Rose shows that workers often described reading as a form of inner liberation, citing writers like Ruskin, Carlyle, and Dickens as their moral guides. They read with a degree of seriousness we rarely see today, treating their books as beloved companions in a lifelong pursuit of wisdom.
The rise of mass media and television following WWII caused a preference for reading to slowly give way to one for passive entertainment.
And the democratization of education paradoxically coincided with a lowering of intellectual standards — just as more people than ever attend university today, yet popular culture as a whole is much less intellectually vibrant than it was 50 years ago.
Mark Eltringham retweeted
In the mid-2000s, sequels and reboots made up less than 10% of top-grossing films. By the mid-2010s, it doubled to over 22%.
In 2026 approximately 63% of major theatrical releases are based on existing IP (reboots, spinoffs, sequels), compared to just 37% that are entirely original ideas.
First time directors who break through are now led towards reboots as their next move.
(Data from Stephen Follows Film Data Research.)
Link below.👇
Mark Eltringham retweeted
Received a moving message from an aspiring mid-20s professional that, I think, captures an increasingly widespread despair among younger cohorts:
"It really saddens me when I hear about the work [senior people in the field] are doing. Their work seems interesting, and I'll never get to do it.
The people in their fifties and sixties, they're lucky. I'm even lucky. I feel bad for the kids who are fourteen. I at least got a chance to use my brain for one or two minutes, and that's still priceless. I got to be human. I got to be more than just some puppet who presses Enter so something can think for me.
It's very depressing looking at people who are sixty, who I would love to be in twenty years. But to know that I won't get to do that because Dario said so, right? And, like, that's actually heartbreaking.
It's heartbreaking to know that no matter how hard you try and no matter what you do, you cannot add value as a human being in a year or two's time.
It's like hitting a brick wall. You feel no motivation to build the skill, to get better, to attain wisdom and knowledge. It seems worthless to you. And all the older people are telling you all your efforts might be worthless, and they don't need you anymore. And they can just sit there and, you know, make money and leave you to drown."