James Flint

@Nigel_Farage Those people were praying. We have freedom of religion in this country. That is one of the values we fought for.

What we witnessed in London at the historic Trafalgar Square, in a country built on Judeo-Christian values, was a group of people attempting dominance over our capital city and our culture. We are not going to surrender everything that was built over centuries and defended at great cost in two world wars for us to be a free, independent nation. The British people will not put up with this any longer — simple as.

I found a way to read a research paper the way academics actually read them. A friend of mine at Cambridge showed me her Claude workflow. I thought she was just fast. Then I watched her pull apart a methodology section in twenty minutes that her seminar group had spent a week discussing without fully understanding. Here's exactly what she did: First: she didn't ask Claude to summarise the paper. That's what everyone does. They paste in a paper and ask for a summary. They get a clean paragraph. They feel like they've read it. They move on. That's not reading. That's skimming with extra steps. She did something completely different. She read the paper herself first. All of it. Without Claude. Then she asked: "Based on the methodology and results sections alone, what can and cannot be legitimately concluded from this study? Now read the abstract and tell me where the authors overreach." She wasn't asking Claude to read the paper for her. She was using it to test whether the paper was actually saying what it claimed to be saying. The gap between those two things is where most students get lost. They read what the authors claim and treat it as what the authors found. An experienced academic never does that. She learned not to in twenty minutes. But the next part is what I keep thinking about. She asked: "What did this study not measure that would have significantly strengthened or weakened the central claim? What is the authors' methodology quietly assuming without ever stating it?" Most students read a methodology section to understand what the researchers did. She read it to find what they didn't do and what they hoped nobody would notice. Those are completely different acts of reading. One produces a student who can describe a study. The other produces a researcher who can evaluate one. Her seminar group spent a week on the same paper and never reached that question. Then she did something most students never think to do. She tested the paper against itself. "If I tried to replicate this study with a different population in a different context, what would most likely change about the results? What does that tell me about how far the authors' conclusions actually travel?" Most published claims are presented as general. Most are actually specific. That question finds the line between the two every time. Once you see it you cannot read a paper without looking for it. It changes what you take from every study you ever read after that. Then she mapped the paper's place in the conversation. She asked: "What debate is this paper entering? Who wrote the work this paper is responding to and what would those authors say back? Where does this paper sit in the argument that was already happening before it was written?" She stopped reading papers as standalone objects that day. Every paper is a reply to something. Most students never find out what. She found out in five minutes and it changed the way the paper meant something entirely. A paper you understand in isolation is information. A paper you understand inside its conversation is knowledge. Then she ran the final check. Before closing the paper she asked: "What is the single most important citation missing from this paper that every serious researcher in this field would consider essential? What conversation is this author not in that they should be?" She found a foundational paper the authors had never cited. Not because they were careless. Because they came from a slightly different tradition and had a blind spot they weren't aware of. That blind spot explained a gap in their argument she hadn't been able to name until that moment. She walked into the seminar and named it. Her supervisor stopped the discussion and asked her to explain how she'd found it. She told him she'd asked the right questions of the paper instead of just reading it. He told her that was exactly what twenty years in academia teaches you to do. She'd been doing it for three weeks. Here is the actual workflow. Five questions. In order. Question one: what can and cannot be legitimately concluded from the methodology and results alone? Where does the abstract overreach? Question two: what did this study not measure that would have changed what it found? What is the methodology quietly assuming it never defends? Question three: if you replicated this with a different population or context, what changes? How far do the conclusions actually travel? Question four: what debate is this paper entering? Who is it responding to and what would those people say back? Question five: what is the most important paper missing from the bibliography? What conversation is this author not in? Most students spend three years at university reading papers from the outside. Those five questions put you on the inside in twenty minutes. Claude didn't read the paper for her. It taught her the questions that experienced academics ask automatically after years in a field. She just learned them earlier. The papers didn't change. The questions did. Most students finish a paper feeling like they've understood it. She finished a paper knowing exactly what it proved, what it didn't prove, where it sat in the field, and what it was quietly hoping nobody would ask. That is not a faster way to read. It's a completely different thing to do with a paper. And almost nobody teaches it directly.

Congratulations to everyone involved in 'Mr. Nobody Against Putin' on winning the Oscar for Best Documentary. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should. It’s an extraordinarily insightful film that shows exactly how dictatorships sink their claws into institutions and use them to shape everyday life under their rule. It exposes the true depth and reach of Putin’s propaganda in Russian society. Countering propaganda is one of the most important parts of our work, and few films have done more in this fight than 'Mr. Nobody Against Putin.' Putin’s propaganda is a weapon, perhaps even more dangerous than nuclear arms. It is the fuel driving the war against Ukraine. This is a phenomenal achievement by Pavel Talankin, David Borenstein, and everyone else involved. I’m proud that one of my foundations supported the film's impact campaign and its awards and festival promotion, helping it reach the widest possible audience. Mr. Nobody Against Putin is one of the most important anti-war statements of our time. The Oscar and the BAFTA were both richly deserved.

I worked at Epic Games for two years. This is real, and the strategy behind it is smarter than most people realize. Tim Sweeney has spent nearly two decades buying North Carolina forest land. 50,000+ acres across 15 counties. He’s now one of the largest private landowners in the state. The purchases started in 2008, right after the real estate collapse wiped out developers who had been planning golf resorts and luxury communities on biodiverse wilderness. Sweeney paid $15 million for Box Creek Wilderness, a 7,000-acre stretch in the Blue Ridge foothills containing 130+ rare and threatened species. Developers had owned 5,000 of those acres before the crash. He bought them for conservation prices when nobody else was bidding. He runs the acquisitions through an LLC called “130 of Chatham.” He buys the land, holds it for years, then either donates it to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, sells it at a discount to state parks, or hands it to land trusts. In 2021, he donated 7,500 acres in the Roan Highlands to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. Largest private land donation in North Carolina history. The part people miss: he told the News & Observer that since 2021, land got too expensive to keep buying. So he shifted focus to converting his existing 50,000 acres into permanent conservation status. He’s locking the land into legal structures that make development impossible regardless of who owns it in the future. A billionaire worth roughly $6 billion is spending tens of millions acquiring wilderness specifically during economic downturns, then giving it away or placing it under permanent legal protection. The land will outlast him, Epic Games, and Fortnite. That’s the part that separates Sweeney from billionaires who write checks to get their name on a building. The building depreciates. The forest compounds.

Thames Water's fat cat crime boss Chris Weston refuses to meet with Basingstoke council leaders. Yep, that the kind of arrogance you get when you know you're never going to be investigated, know you're never going to be prosecuted, know you'll never be held to account. The water industry is nothing more than a criminal enterprise operating in a failed state. basingstokegazette.co.uk/news/25923388.…

The most important Oscar speech tonight wasn’t about film. The director of “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” just said this from the stage: “You lose your country through countless small acts of complicity. When we act complicit when a government murders people on the streets. When oligarchs take over the media and control how we produce and consume it. We all face a moral choice. But even a nobody is more powerful than you think.” He was talking about Russia. The audience knew he was talking about America too. Elon Musk owns the platform you’re reading this on. David Ellison is buying CNN — Pete Hegseth said it will be “far better” when he does. The DOGE deposition videos were removed from YouTube. The Epstein files are sealed. The Pentagon won’t release a casualty count. Countless small acts of complicity. That’s how you lose it. A nobody is more powerful than you think. Never stop connecting the dots.

No, it started when he began spreading misinformation, promoting racism and conspiracy theories, and supporting fascist politicians while interfering in politics in multiple countries

Big Tech locates its spine share.google/EXzyg6If3oxC6I…

See? We can make a difference. theguardian.com/environment/20…

Ezra Klein: "Having AI summarize a book or paper for me is a disaster. It has no idea what I really wanted to know and wouldn't have made the connections I would've made. I'm interested in the thing I will see that other people wouldn't have seen, and I think AI typically sees what everybody else would see. I'm not saying that AI can't be useful, but I'm pretty against shortcuts. And obviously, you have to limit the amount of work you're doing. You can't read literally everything. But in some ways, I think it's more dangerous to think you've read something that you haven't than to not read it at all. I think the time you spend with things is pretty important." @ezraklein

Every time you read one of these disingenuous - no, strike that - outrageously dishonest propaganda pieces from @DavidLammy and @sarahsackman, remember that the freedoms they wish to curtail are designed to protect people wrongly accused of criminal offences.

Well done everyone, you did it.... my thanks and respect. 👏👏👏 Humongous job. 👏👏👏 Watch out for updates from @SOSWhitstable

New study that everyone who uses LLMs should read. “When AI systems are trained to be helpful, they may inadvertently prioritize data that validates the user’s narrative over data that gets them closer to the truth.” open.substack.com/pub/garymarcus…

OMG 💀🤣😂 This is bloody hilarious 🤣

AIが復元した「清明上河図」に言葉を失う。確かに、AI特有の「滑らかすぎる質感」に違和感を覚える瞬間もある。だが、張択端が描こうとした千年前の喧騒が、圧倒的な解像度で迫ってくるのも事実だから、これは模写ではない。AIという異質なフィルターを通すことで、われわれは初めて「大宋」の熱気に触れる。賛否はあろうが、この没入感だけは否定できないかもしれない。

A continent-long “brown ribbon” has appeared in the Atlantic off Africa — and scientists say it’s not a good sign - Futura-Sciences share.google/tJ0xo8PA7abmRy…

The paper says the best way to manage AI context is to treat everything like a file system. Today, a model's knowledge sits in separate prompts, databases, tools, and logs, so context engineering pulls this into a coherent system. The paper proposes an agentic file system where every memory, tool, external source, and human note appears as a file in a shared space. A persistent context repository separates raw history, long term memory, and short lived scratchpads, so the model's prompt holds only the slice needed right now. Every access and transformation is logged with timestamps and provenance, giving a trail for how information, tools, and human feedback shaped an answer. Because large language models see only limited context each call and forget past ones, the architecture adds a constructor to shrink context, an updater to swap pieces, and an evaluator to check answers and update memory. All of this is implemented in the AIGNE framework, where agents remember past conversations and call services like GitHub through the same file style interface, turning scattered prompts into a reusable context layer. ---- Paper Link – arxiv. org/abs/2512.05470 Paper Title: "Everything is Context: Agentic File System Abstraction for Context Engineering"

“I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game.” —JG Ballard

Hugh gets it, how come govt doesn't?!

The cover of the Lancet. It says it all.