Dave Griffiths

@red_mutant_eyes I've just started on the first Discworld novel. Only a few pages in but I keep making excuses like "I'm sure it'll be good once it gets going".

I don’t wish to ruffle any feathers but I tried and absolutely hated it.

@consequence What a weird awkward conversation. Thought they hung out quite a bit in the 60s and smoked weed etc. Maybe that was more John. Also surely the reason George joined the Wilburys was because they were already mates.

Paul McCartney says he's still "nervous to approach" Bob Dylan. "I'm a fan, but y'know, I don't know him well enough. George knew him very well because they were in the Traveling Wilburys together. I'm a little bit nervous to approach him. Some people, it's easy, you sort of think we can chat easily. "Last time I saw Bob, it was a few years ago, we are at Coachella and they did the Desert Trip, so it was a lot of vintage acts. Us, Stones, Bob, Neil Young, and one of our girls said, 'Bob Dylan wants to see you.' "Anyway, I came in to see him, and it was like, 'Wow.' It was just him and me in this massive, big tent backstage. He was very complimentary, it's funny because it was kind of a little bit embarrassing, he said, 'You’re a star.' And I thought, what do you say to that? 'Well, thank you, Bob. I love what you do.'" (via @BBCRadio2's Track of My Years) 📸: Fairchild Archive/Getty Images

@Ric_RTP I’m guessing you’re not a programmer yourself? I’ve been one for many many years and Claude absolutely blows my socks off. Ten times more productive. It’s a power tool but you have to know how to handle it.

Microsoft just banned its own engineers from using AI. The tool was literally costing MORE than the humans it was supposed to replace. They lied to you about AI adoption and now the whole narrative is blowing up: Microsoft gave thousands of engineers access to Claude Code six months ago and encouraged them to use it. Engineers loved it and adoption exploded. But then the invoices arrived. Token-based pricing means every query, every code review, every debugging session costs money. At scale across 100,000 engineers, the numbers became so large that Microsoft issued an internal order to cancel nearly all Claude Code licenses by end of June and force everyone onto their own cheaper tool instead. The company that invested $5 billion in Anthropic just told its own people to stop using Anthropic's product because it costs too much. Uber's story is even worse... Their CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information that the budget he planned for the full year was "blown away already" by April. Uber had rolled out Claude Code in December 2025. By March, 84% of their 5,000 engineers were using it with 70% of all committed code coming from AI systems. Heavy users were burning $500 to $2,000 per month each. Naga himself spent $1,200 in a single two-hour demo session. The company had even built internal leaderboards ranking engineers by how much AI they used. They literally gamified the spending and then ran out of money. Now look at what Nvidia's own VP of applied deep learning Bryan Catanzaro said to Axios last month. Direct quote: "For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees." This is a VP at the company that SELLS the chips saying that using AI is more expensive than paying humans. Think about what this means for the entire AI narrative. Every CEO on every earnings call for the past two years has said the same thing: AI will make us more efficient, reduce headcount, and cut costs. The stock market rewarded every company that said it. Fired workers, stock goes up. Announced AI adoption, stock goes up. But the actual companies deploying AI at scale are discovering the math doesn't work. The MORE employees use AI, the HIGHER the bill. Goldman Sachs forecasts a 24x increase in token consumption by 2030 as companies adopt AI agents. Gartner just published a report showing that even though individual token prices will drop 90% by 2030, total enterprise AI costs will go UP because agents consume exponentially more tokens per task than basic tools. Meta built an internal dashboard called "Claudeonomics" to track which employees use the most AI. Amazon started pushing engineers to "tokenmaxx," their internal term for consuming as many AI tokens as possible. Both companies are spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure this year alone. And Microsoft, the company that bet its entire future on AI, just told 100,000 engineers to stop using the tool they liked best because the per-token bills got out of control. The companies building AI are telling investors it saves money. The companies using AI are finding out it costs more than the humans it was supposed to replace. And even the company that makes the chips just admitted it through its own VP. This is the gap nobody on Wall Street is pricing in. $725 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year across Big Tech. And the first companies to actually deploy these tools at scale are already pulling back because the economics don't work. What do you think?

@OliverKamm The Beatles used aeolian cadences without knowing what they were called. I very much doubt Shakespeare knew what a preposition is. You don’t need the technical scaffolding to learn how to write grammatically correct sentences. It just needs to sound right.

This has had a fair number of replies, including from me and some from people who think it’s wrong (or even ludicrous) to require children at KS2 to know what a preposition is. So let me go through it.

@metaburbia Late 70s and earning money decided to take my parents from Oswestry to the big nearby town Wrexham for a night out. Tumbleweeds…

I remember being taken out to dinner exactly once as a kid. To a Chinese restaurant in Cardiff.

Introduce yourself with 10 bands you've seen live Groundhogs Sensational Alex Harvey Band Rolling Stones The Fall The Clash Buzzcocks New Order Jesus and Mary Chain Charlatans The Smyths (tribute band)

@wself AI solved an Erdős problem by taking ideas from one deep mathematical silo and applying them to another. Mathematicians don’t have time now to explore both. Similarly with the culture so broad who has time to absorb the accumulated sediment necessary to fully appreciate Ulysses?

@NuWurldHoarder @people_not3471 @Froglet_602cc @pennypeachpit @EricIdle “Most” lol. I’m a boomer, don’t recall a single mate being either racist or sexist back in the 70s. Was aware that some people were just like there are now. I do remember our generation creating the Rock Against Racism movement. Don’t seem to see as much of that kind of thing now

@people_not3471 @Froglet_602cc @pennypeachpit @EricIdle Most boomers are inherently racist. Their generation wasn’t exposed to much multiculturalism so they are uneasy about different skin colours. That applies to all races. The younger generations are mostly cool with each other. Things change

I have no feud with John Cleese. He is who he is. I have known him for 63 years.

@AlexTran677026 Oh, didn’t realise it was a war movie, thought it was about a wedding. But must admit I’ve never gotten beyond the hour mark.

The Deer Hunter (1978) isn’t really a Vietnam War movie — it’s a film about the people war leaves behind. Instead of focusing on combat, Michael Cimino shows ordinary working-class friends before, during, and after Vietnam, making the emotional damage feel devastatingly real. The long first act matters because it builds the friendships and innocence that later collapse under trauma. The Russian roulette scenes remain some of cinema’s most intense, but the film’s real power is in its aftermath — how war fractures minds, friendships, and entire lives. Haunting, painful, and unforgettable, it remains one of the greatest works of American cinema.

@ahmedsohail Interesting. I read this by Judith Woods and assumed it was just the Telegraph being the Telegraph telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/1…

I attended the Unite The Kingdom rally today to do interviews with participants and understand, in their own words, why they were there. While I found some of the speakers addressing the rally genuinely abhorrent, the people I spoke to were quite decidedly… not. (1/7)

@luxemiaa When my kids were born 20 or so years ago I created gmail adresses for them which they use today. They’ve grown up with them so probably don’t realise how rare they are.

My little sister asked for my email address. I told her it’s just my first name and last name at Gmail. She looked at me like I had casually announced that I own beachfront property in Malibu. She said, “How did you get that? I could never get mine.” I said, “Because I was there when Gmail was invented.” And that is apparently how I found out my email address is now considered historical evidence. Back then, you could just type your actual name and somehow it was still available. No extra numbers. No random underscores. No adding “official” at the end because twelve other people had already claimed it. Just your name and Gmail. Simple times. My sister looked genuinely impressed, like.......

Also loved the subliminal PUB references 🍺

Moldova is so juicy - best yet! #Eurovisión2026

Look Mum No Computer actually looking good compared to what came before #Eurovisión2026

@barneyronay It is genuinely baffling that a petro-state club like Man City who the Premier League don’t dare punish are less hated.

Genuine question: why DO people hate Arsenal so much? theguardian.com/football/2026/…

@daniel_dsj2110 A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-1965

In your opinion, what is the best intellectual history book written since 2000.

@ihtesham2005 I have aphantasia and dream a lot but it is not the vivid detailed pictures you describe, it is the same kind of thing I see if I try to picture something with my eyes shut. Which is hard to describe but definitely not like looking at something in real life.

A Stanford neuroscientist published a paper a few years ago that quietly answered one of the oldest questions in human history, and almost nobody outside his field has heard of it. The question is why we dream. Not what dreams mean. Why they exist at all. Why your brain spends a third of its sleep hallucinating images instead of just resting like every other organ in your body. His name is David Eagleman. He runs a lab at Stanford. The paper is called "The Defensive Activation Theory", and the moment you read it the explanation collapses every other theory you have ever been taught about dreams. Freud said dreams were repressed desires. He was guessing. He had no brain scans. He had no electrodes. He had a couch and a notebook and a century of credibility that nobody has been able to fully scrub off the subject since. Modern neuroscience replaced him with the memory "consolidation theory". The idea that dreams are your brain sorting through the day, filing things away, deciding what to keep. That story is partially true. Sleep does consolidate memory. But it does not explain the single strangest thing about dreams, which is that they are almost entirely visual. You do not dream in pure sound. You do not dream in taste. You do not dream in smell. You dream in pictures. Vivid, detailed, often impossible pictures that activate the back of your brain so hard a scientist scanning you would think your eyes were wide open. Eagleman started from one fact almost nobody outside neuroscience knows. The brain is territorial. Every region holds its turf through constant electrical activity. The moment a region goes quiet, its neighbors start invading. They take the silent territory and reassign it to themselves. This is called "cortical takeover", and it is not slow. It is not a long process measured in years. In experiments where adults are blindfolded, the visual cortex starts processing touch and sound within an hour. One hour of darkness, and the territory is already being annexed. In congenitally blind people, the visual cortex is fully repurposed. It runs language. It runs hearing. It runs touch. The hardware never went unused. It was just reassigned to whoever showed up first. Now sit with the implication of that for a second. Every night, when you close your eyes and fall asleep, the sun has set. The planet has rotated. The visual cortex, which takes up roughly a third of your entire cortex, is suddenly receiving zero input. For eight hours. Every single night. For your entire life. And evolution has shaped your brain inside a planet that has been spinning into darkness for billions of years. If cortical takeover happens in an hour, the visual cortex should have been lost a long time ago. Stolen by hearing. Stolen by touch. Reassigned by morning. Humans should have evolved into a species whose vision works fine during the day and then degrades every time the sun goes down because the territory keeps getting renegotiated overnight. But that did not happen. Vision works the moment you open your eyes. Which means something is defending the territory while you sleep. Eagleman's claim is that dreams are that defense. Every 90 minutes through the night, a precise burst of activity fires from the brainstem into the visual cortex. Pontine-geniculate-occipital waves. PGO for short. They are anatomically aimed. They are not general arousal. They are a targeted volley of signal launched directly at the back of the brain where vision lives. The cortex lights up as if it is receiving real images, and you experience that artificial activation as a dream. The bizarre narrative your conscious mind invents around it later is just your brain trying to make sense of the noise. The dream is not the point. The dream is the side effect. The point is keeping the territory occupied. The evidence for this is the part that should haunt you. Newborns spend roughly 50% of their sleep in REM. Adults spend twenty. Old adults spend fifteen. The amount of dreaming you do tracks almost perfectly with how plastic your brain is. Newborns have the most plastic brains on earth. Their visual cortex is in the highest danger of being overrun by neighboring senses while it develops. So evolution gave them an enormous defense budget. As you age, your brain becomes less plastic, the takeover risk drops, and the defense system scales down accordingly. Eagleman and his co-author ran the same correlation across twenty-five primate species. The more plastic a species' brain, the higher the proportion of REM sleep. The relationship held across the entire primate family tree. Plasticity and dreaming move together. They are two halves of the same evolutionary equation. A species that ranks higher on flexibility and learning also dreams more. A species that is born ready to walk and survive dreams less. Plasticity is the asset. Dreaming is the insurance premium. And the prediction the theory makes is the one that quietly closes the case. Of all your senses, only one is disadvantaged by darkness. You can still hear in the dark. You can still feel in the dark. You can still smelll and taste in the dark. The only sense that depends on light is vision. Which is exactly the sense your dreams are made of. The defense system is targeted at the only territory that is actually vulnerable while you sleep. Memory consolidation is real. Emotional processing is real. Your brain does do those things at night. But Eagleman's argument is that those functions piggyback on a much older system whose original job was simpler and more brutal. Keep the lights on inside the visual cortex while the planet is dark, or lose it. For thousands of years, people have asked what dreams mean. Prophets wrote about them. Poets wrote about them. Freud built a discipline on them. None of them had access to the actual answer, which is that dreams may not mean anything in the symbolic sense at all. They may be the visible flicker of a defense system running in the background, the way a screen saver protects a monitor by keeping the pixels moving even when nobody is looking. The strangest thing about the theory is how cleanly it explains why dreams feel so real. Your visual cortex cannot tell the difference between a PGO wave and an actual photon. It is the same hardware lighting up the same way. The cortex does its job. It builds an image. Your conscious mind, half-awake, wraps a story around it and calls it a dream. You are not seeing your subconscious tonight. You are watching your brain defend a piece of itself from being stolen. Every animal that has ever closed its eyes on this planet has done the same thing.

@wasphyxiation Hello, love the way everyone piles in as though they were there and remember it well!

The greeting "hello" did not exist until the telephone because there was no need for a context-free general-purpose greeting until phone calls

@ellis_platten Especially given that Boro absolutey battered Saints in the first leg first half (after which they'd have made changes anyway). Hard to see how they could have been any more dominant if Saints were less well informed.

The Southampton stuff is fascinating... Say they are guilty etc. How much impact does them 'spying' have on an outcome? Really curious to know how much difference it would have made.

@GagsTandon I think you're underestimating Starmer here

I reckon he resigns, you know. The lack of contract extension is enough of a slap in the face after winning the title. The toxicity around the club is at a decade high and things just look bleak. I'm sure he can feel it too. IMO he may just go this route to save face.