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Thought for the day: Computer science is practical philosophy.

@GOPIsrael I don't defend the UK, at least they could send a couple of minesweepers, something they are good at. But the US did not assist the UK in the Falklands war. The best Margaret Thatcher got from Ronald Reagan was to remain neutral.

Argentina is sending naval units to assist the U.S. in safeguarding international shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. The UK has refused. In 1982 President Reagan came to the aid of then PM Margaret Thatcher who was defending the UK colony in the Falkland Islands, claimed by Argentina which refers to them as the Malvinas Islands. In light of the UK’s cowardly refusal to support the US in the Persian Gulf conflict, I think it only appropriate for the Trump Administration to consider reversing US policy on the Falklands and support the Argentinian claim.

@HansMahncke As I understand it, the US has no/few minesweepers. The UK, I think, still has a couple. This is the basis of the request. Building minesweepers is specialized, glass-fibre hull etc.

This is a great example of the failure of credentialism. Random people have to explain basic political science to a so-called “Professor of Political Science.” The Strait of Hormuz issue is the perfect “allies” test. The United States has very little direct interest in the strait, as almost none of its ships or energy flows pass through there. So before the United States starts doing all the heavy lifting, it is the ideal moment to ask those who actually benefit from the strait being open what they are willing to contribute. The fact that they all said nothing is proof of what Trump has been saying all along, that supposed “allies” are really just freeloaders. So this was never about whether the Europeans could actually help with a handful of dilapidated frigates. It was a test, and they all failed.

@Dr_TheHistories The most partial reading of the historical record I could imagine.

In 326 BCE, deep into his campaign, Alexander’s army reached the edge of the known world. The battles were hard, the heat brutal, and the local resistance unlike anything they had seen in Persia or Greece. But what truly left a mark on Alexander wasn’t the swords. It was a group of barefoot men who wanted nothing from him at all. These were the Indian philosophers later called gymnosophists, which means “naked wise men” in Greek. They weren’t priests or generals. They didn’t build temples or lead armies. They lived outside, slept on the ground, and taught by example. One of them, a man named Dandamis, refused to come meet the great king unless Alexander came to him. And Alexander did. What followed was not a standoff. It was a conversation. Dandamis told the Macedonian king that all his conquests, all his cities and armies, would eventually turn to dust. That power disappears, wealth rots, and death cannot be bargained with. To a man who had taken Egypt, Persia, and more by the age of thirty, that should have sounded like madness. But Alexander listened. He was impressed, even moved. He gave the gymnosophists gifts, asked them questions, and left them in peace. This wasn’t a clash of civilizations. It was something stranger. A warrior king obsessed with immortality meeting men who had already given up on it. Their teachings came from a very different world, one shaped not by conquest but by introspection. Karma, rebirth, liberation from the self — ideas that sounded alien to Greek ears but would echo through Roman and later European writings about India for centuries. Alexander’s empire eventually fell apart. The gymnosophists, meanwhile, left no statues, no coins, no monuments. But their words survived, carried back to the West by scribes and travelers. And for a brief moment on the edge of India, power met stillness, and stillness won. #drthehistories

@chribreuer Carl Gustav Jung.

One interesting thing about the Swiss is that, although they’re essentially “super Germans” in terms of efficiency and economy, they never developed the same kind of high culture as Germans or Austrians. No composers, no poets, and no philosophers

@markyzaguirre Marvellous.

At best, only one in ten people know the original definition of “decimate”, so it’s probably best to move on

@LeeHurstComic The fault is representative democracy itself. Switch them at any point, we still get people who follow their ideology rather than our interests. If 100,00 signatures got a binding referendum on any government policy, like Switzerland, the madness would stop.

Starmer is living proof of my concept of changing the voting system. Instead of electing ALL 650 MPs every 5 years, we elect 150 MPs every year. This would mean that his majority would be slashed already and he would see the writing on the wall far more vividly than any poll could show. We would also no longer need the House of Lords, a huge saving in taxpayers’ money. To the naysayers who claim this would cause chaos I believe it would be the exact opposite. It would reign political parties in to be more considered knowing they need to to the job right or they will be out of office PDQ.

@jk_rowling I agree, the left's principal tool is modifying language. But, what about all the other areas where they do this? The conflation of race and culture, so that any cultural criticism is racist, the conversion of weak sub-science into climate dogma? Will we hear your views on those?

'He has a point, but he's too blunt.' From the start, a key tactic of the gender identitarians has been linguistic prescription, and it's proved shockingly successful. Trans activists' shibboleths and euphemisms have been allowed to penetrate the upper echelons of our culture with devastating consequences to freedom of speech and belief. Huge swathes of liberal media, the arts, academia and publishing have thrown themselves with gusto into the defence of a quasi-religious belief causing provable real world harm, and in their arrogance they've been outraged when people they assumed were part of their In Group have refused to march meekly along in lock step. Time and again, I've seen and heard well-educated people who consider themselves critical thinkers and bold truth-tellers squirm when put on the spot. 'Well, yes, maybe there's something in what you're saying, but it's hateful/provocative/rude not to use the approved language/pretend people can literally change sex/keep drawing attention to medical malpractice or opportunistic sexual predators. Why can't you be nice? Why won't you pretend? We thought you were one of us! Don't you realise we have sophisticated new words and phrases these days that obviate the necessity of thinking any of this through?' As the vibe shifts, and a lot of people in the elite professions start trying to reposition themselves, the obvious place to start is, 'it's not that I couldn't see your point, but did you have to say it that way?' We dissenters were supposed to find a way of questioning the chemical castration of children while calling it 'gender affirming care.' We were meant to defend the rights of vulnerable women while also using female pronouns for male rapists. We should have found a way to discuss fairness for women and girls in sport, while pretending that the ineradicable physical advantage men have over women doesn't exist. Either a man can be a woman, or he can't. Either women deserve rights, or they don't. Either there's a provable medical benefit to transitioning children, or there isn't. Either you're on the side of a totalitarian ideology that seeks to impose falsehoods on society through the threat of ostracisation, shaming and violence, or you're not. The alternative to being 'blunt' - using accurate, factual language to describe what was going on - was to surrender freedom of speech and espouse ideological jargon that obfuscated the issues and the harms caused. We've always needed blunt people, but we need them most of all when being asked to bow down to a naked emperor.

@TheSimonEvans @BoozeAndFagz Television often chooses the wackiest, rather than the most learned, as is the case with Mary Beard. However, 100 years ago, the bien pensant in the west were mostly eugenicists and Socialists, if not Marxists. Being well-read was no antidote to Nazism.

Great column by @BoozeAndFagz There was some discussion this week of Will Self’s (actually nuanced but truncated) assertion that reading widely immunises against fascism. This is obviously incorrect. Many fascists were very well read. Maybe a little too well read. What is less often acknowledged is that reading too much history (with a certain predisposition in place) can actually make one too indifferent to the undesirable forces at play in one’s own epoch, as though they were little more than just another chapter in history’s insubstantial pageant. Thus, Beard.

@LeeHurstComic Disastrous idea. In my first job, designing RN marine control systems, I had to occasionally visit the ministry in Bath. No end of retired naval officers flew paper airplanes at each other. Decisions took months. There were no technical skills on display at all.

Who else thinks all MOD staff should be recruited from the military only?

@clim8resistance I've noticed this. Lord Hannan has a Boris-like ability to switch his views at a moments notice. He is a very good public speaker, and very bright, but he seems to lack a strong foundational view of democracy or the purpose of government.

A reminder: Dan Hannan wrote in favour of the abolition of coal, oil & gas, petrol and diesel cars, & domestic boilers. He said that there was no point arguing about it because the decision had been made, industries were already adapting, and Britain was leading the world.

@LozzaFox @TRobinsonNewEra The diagram implies Farage is in T Robinson's support network! These people are idiots.

Not only did I find out that I made Hate not Hope’s list of “hate” yesterday, but today I find out that I’m also in the @TRobinsonNewEra “circle of hate.” It’s like Christmas and a child’s birthday party coming all at once!

@NotProbableSpam @BrexitDuck I don't see how that follows. Presumably people from each of these nations can be equally proud.

@BrexitDuck Hmm I agree but you could read from that you're saying Scotland, Wales and N.Ireland are lesser entities... Surely not.

My DNA test proves my ancestry goes back thousands of years in England. I am English. Our home secretary may be British. But she will never be English.

On confabulation, rather than hallucination. We've got used to calling bad results from LLMs "hallucinations". Geoffrey Hinton has suggested "Confabulation" instead. I'm sure he's aware of one of the pioneers of AI, Robert Hecht-Nielsen, who wrote a book in 2007 called "Confabulation theory". The basic idea of this work is that cognition is based on learned sequences, and he showed how the next item in a sequence could be "confabulated" from other learned sequences. I met Robert only once in the early days of AI. I had a meeting once at his company, but he was already off with the disease that would ultimately kill him. It's a shame he's not remembered as one of the authors of LLMs.

@LakeLouise1988 @RapidResponse47 @RepMcClintock @Sec_Noem None of what you have said made the statement false.

FALSE☝️…as always. - The homicide decline was already well underway before the Trump admin’s mass deportation efforts ramped up in 2025. National data shows a 17% drop in homicides from 2023 to 2024, with the 21% plunge from 2024 to 2025 simply adding to an existing trend that began during the Biden years. #ThankYouJoe ! - While DHS touted over 605,000 deportations & 595,000 arrests of illegal aliens in 2025, only about 25-35% of deportees had any criminal records at all …and FAR fewer had violent convictions. Less than 14% of ICE arrests in Trump’s first year involved violent criminal records, with MOST “criminal” classifications stemming from minor offenses like traffic violations or old immigration infractions.

.@RepMcClintock: So you've effectively removed over half a million illegal aliens with criminal records from our streets? @Sec_Noem: Yes. @RepMcClintock: And what's that done to our crime rate? @Sec_Noem: We have the lowest murder rate in recorded history—over 125 years.

@ColinBrazierTV That's strange isn't it? 63% say they experienced Racism. One wonders who from? The other 37%? That would imply that racism is pursued by a minority. Can stations that hired such a high percentage of minorities that they are no longer a minority be racist?

Amid the hysteria of the BLM Terror, I was offered an exciting opportunity by Sky News to participate in an unconscious bias course to root-out my white privilege. I say "offered", which suggests it was optional, which it wasn't. The course was, of course, meretricious, grifting bunk. "Diversity", for much of the MSM, is increasingly a fig-leaf for group-think, activism and grievance mongering. Hilariously, so many of the people who work in our legacy media think of themselves as being part of the counter-culture. In reality they are Establishment stooges and a grudging block on true cognitive diversity.

@BarronTNews_ First enemy ship sunk by the US. A British submarine sunk the Belgrano during the Falkands war with a torpedo.

🚨 An Iranian warship thought it was safe sitting in international waters. Then a US submarine sent a torpedo and ended the story. Quiet. Precise. Gone. First enemy ship sunk by torpedo since World War II. Don’t mess with the United States Navy. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

@OglaghnaHeirean @jatticusbowden @ProudofusUK No, that was the Normans, who invaded 1066 and formed a thin aristocracy that's still here. The English, such as myself, have DNA linked back to northern Germany and parts of Scandinavia a thousand years ago.

@ThinkBaseLLC @jatticusbowden @ProudofusUK English are still Britons to this day with all the migrants brought over, the Germanic stuff was allways the royals.

After we told the story of the Celts, you asked us one question more than any other. ❔❓❔ What happened to the Britons? 🏰 They were here for over three thousand years before Rome set foot on this island. They spoke Brythonic. The ancestor of Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. They built Maiden Castle. The largest hill fort in Europe. Six hundred years before Christ. And over two thousand more across Britain. Their kings minted coins stamped with their own names. Their settlements stretched for miles. They traded wine with Rome and pottery with Gaul. The Greeks wrote about them. And called them civilised. ⚔️ When Rome invaded in 43 AD, Caractacus fought them for seven years across the mountains of Wales. When they captured him and dragged him before the Emperor, he gave a speech so defiant they let him live. Then Boudicca burned London to the ground. Seventy thousand dead. Rome won. Eventually. But the Britons didn't disappear. They adapted. Built Roman towns. Spoke Latin in public and Brythonic at home. At Bath, they merged their goddess Sulis with Rome's Minerva. Then Rome left. The Saxons came. And the textbooks say the Britons vanished. Replaced. Gone. 🧬 Except they weren't. In 2022, scientists analysed hundreds of ancient skeletons buried across England. DNA from people who lived through the Saxon arrival. The Britons weren't replaced. They survived. They passed it down. They continued. Much of your ancestry traces back to the Britons and earlier. In the west, it's even more. The people the textbooks erased are still here. The Saxons built England. But the Britons are its foundations. Three thousand years. And they're still here. Not in a museum. Not in a textbook. In you. Be proud of them. Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

@rvivek This is real on a number of platforms. It doesn't always work, but can be very impressive. But describing what you want, and recognising when you've got it are very specialist things. Making another website with a shop is trivial.

An engineer at Anthropic wrote a spec, pointed Claude at an Asana board, and went home. Claude broke the spec into tickets, spawned agents for each one, and they started building independently. When the agent is confused it runs git-blame and messages the right engineers in Slack. By Monday the agents finished the plugin feature. That's one example of how the best engineers are shipping software right now. Developers will soon orchestrate 50 AI agents in parallel and the difference between a good engineer & a great one would come down to specs. You can't write a spec that holds up at that scale without genuinely understanding what you're building at a deeper level. The next-gen developer who understands the fundamentals, can architect well and orchestrate agent is going to be a 1000x developer!