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@tomhfh -Upsides: It has discipline, structure, community. Plans made on a Friday night can be remembered and executed. -Downsides: Believes at least 50% of its own members and 100% of everyone outside it are subservient or inferior. Built around a supernatural entity - there is no god.

I just finished watching Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere. It's a fascinating look at some of the most odious people on the internet. Their medieval attitudes towards women, gay people, and jews. And yet it seemed to sidestep explicitly highlighting a rather significant point regarding their ideology. From Sneako to Andrew Tate, why have so many of these manosphere influencers converted to Islam?

@afneil Following that pattern what we'll now is an expensive time consuming review blaming previous administrations with no useful output. The important bit is use up the money and the time appearing busy and leave no trace.

Just an everyday tale of infrastructure in the UK — how to spend £179m on not building a tunnel.

@ajcdeane Getting nothing done expensively is what the services and consulting industry survives on.  The government will now get some more consultants in to scope a project to not find out why. Visionaries and charlatans build empires - governments and consultants kill them.

We have spent £180m on plans for a tunnel under Stonehenge. The project is now scrapped. You can be for a tunnel & think spending is a good idea (even if you think the cost of planning is silly). You can be against a tunnel & think spending is a bad idea. But *nobody* can be for spending on this scale with zero result. And yet that is a peculiarly British outcome. Nobody will be reprimanded. Nobody will see their career affected. But that’s £180m of taxpayer money just wazzed up the wall. Totally without repercussions. Multiply this by airport expansions & train route plans and Thames crossings and power stations and other examples you can think of yourself, and… soon you’re talking serious money.

@claudeai Can someone there tell Claude how to calculate time and dates? Models not knowing what time it is seems problematic if you want your AI planned cruise missile to avoid school opening hours. Not knowing how to do date arithmetic seems broken. (1921 Census June 19)

Our developer conference Code with Claude returns this spring, this time in San Francisco, London, and Tokyo. Join us for a full day of workshops, demos, and 1:1 office hours with teams behind Claude. Register to watch from anywhere or apply to attend: claude.com/code-with-clau…

@RestIsPolitics @alexstubb

"We should have woken up, smelt the coffee" President @alexstubb on how Europe underestimated Putin's ambitions with the annexation of Crimea.

@AnishA_Moonka @nation10rivers But a system that doesn't recognise that humans will tolerate a random ant but get triggered in response to ant covered bread in the microwave. Also justifies why you should kill any ant you ever see on the premises.

hayek actually made this exact comparison. he called it “spontaneous order,” the idea that decentralized systems with simple local rules outperform central planning. he cited insect colonies as a direct analog. the ant pheromone system is basically a price signal, more traffic on a path = stronger signal = more resources allocated there

A single ant has 250,000 neurons. Your brain has 86 billion. That’s a 344,000x gap. And yet what you’re watching is a colony solving a category of problem that no computer can crack perfectly at scale. It’s called the Steiner tree problem. Given a set of points, find the shortest possible network connecting all of them. First posed in 1811, proved essentially impossible to solve perfectly in 1972 (the computing time grows so fast with size that the world’s fastest supercomputer stalls on a few hundred points). Still one of the hardest open problems in mathematics. Ants solve it with chemistry. When an ant walks a path, it leaves a chemical trail called a pheromone. That trail evaporates over time. Shorter paths get walked faster, so pheromone builds up before it fades. Other ants prefer stronger trails. The colony converges on the shortest route without any single ant knowing the full picture. Jean-Louis Deneubourg at the Free University of Brussels proved this in the early 1990s with a dead simple experiment: two bridges between a nest and food, one twice as long as the other. Within minutes, the colony picked the short one. In 1991, computer scientist Marco Dorigo took that discovery and turned it into an algorithm (a set of step-by-step instructions for a computer) called Ant Colony Optimization. It’s now used to route wires inside microchips with billions of transistors (one study found an 8% reduction in wire length over traditional methods), plan delivery truck routes, and manage internet traffic. The phone you’re reading this on was partially designed using math that ants figured out 100 million years before humans existed. A 2023 study out of Stanford and several other institutions found that turtle ants in the tropical forest canopy build trail networks across tangled branches and vines that approximately solve the Steiner tree problem with zero central control. No ant has any information about the full network. Each one just follows a rule: at each junction, go where the pheromone is strongest. The collective intelligence comes from thousands of these tiny decisions stacking up. Stanford biologist Deborah Gordon has studied this for decades. She compares it directly to how brains work: no single neuron tells the others what to do, but together they produce thought. A 2024 Rockefeller University study found that individual ants decide whether to leave the nest using the same yes-or-no process that brain cells use to decide whether to switch on. The colony is, in a real mechanical sense, a brain spread across thousands of bodies. In early 2025, a Weizmann Institute study pitted ant groups against human groups on a task almost identical to this video: navigating a T-shaped object through a series of obstacles. The bigger the human group, the worse they performed. Too many competing ideas about which direction to push. The bigger the ant group, the better they got. No ego, no debate, just pheromones and simple rules scaling into something that looks a lot like intelligence. 250,000 neurons each. No leader. No blueprint. Solving problems that stumped mathematicians for two centuries.

@yuanyi_z @henryolsenEPPC Not the will of the people. But for politicians assisted dying is a high blame, low reward decision. Even if they privately support it, the rational political strategy is: Present thoughtfulness Extend the process Avoid owning it So referendum is now the only way.

The Scottish assisted suicide bill is defeated! 57 to 69. This is a great day for human dignity in Scotland but also everywhere in the world.

@JonathanPieNews Cowards. Politicians fear visible blame far more than invisible harm. Much easier to diligently waste time pretending to do things and kick it down the road.

What an extraordinary and profound debate this has been. Passion and emotion on both sides of the argument by all involved, but rarely have I seen a debate handled with such respect and honesty. #player" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">bbc.co.uk/news/live/cx2g…

@techradar Surely "The act was done with the intention to pervert the course of justice. " - max sentence life?

A London judge has dismissed the evidence of a witness after they were found to be getting real-time help from someone via their smart glasses. techradar.com/computing/virt…

@business It's a process. The process is whatever annoys him enough to rage post when he wakes up at 3AM to go to the bathroom.

President Donald Trump is keeping allies and foes alike guessing about his endgame for the war with Iran bloomberg.com/news/newslette…

@business Where is the UN in all of this decision making? Either the nations should insist he use use it, or kill it. Paying for a pretend safety net is delusional. Also how about a 50% discount on tariffs?

President Donald Trump said he is “demanding” that other countries contribute to the defense of Strait of Hormuz as it remains effectively closed to oil tankers bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

@SkyNews @Stone_SkyNews @grok Where are we in "The abusive supervision cycle"?

Donald Trump has urged the UK and other nations to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz to help secure the key shipping route out of the Middle East. Our U.S. correspondent @Stone_SkyNews reports ⬇️ Read more 🔗 trib.al/WgjcW8W

@NileGardiner "Just let them have their corner, everything will be fine" - every colonised country in history.

Keir Starmer's top priority right now appears to be the Islamification of Britain.

@zacbowden One of the reasons for staying on Windows Intel vs Linux (or RT) has always been application support. I and others have tried switching multiple times - always came back. Once you go Arm what is the argument for Windows?

A Windows laptop that actually genuinely is a better deal than the $599 MacBook Neo. Better display, more powerful SoC, more RAM/storage, more ports, premium build. All round incredible laptop for $499.

@engineers_feed If the metric system wasn't French would you have adopted it?

World of Engineering Quiz: A 300 ft. train is traveling 300 ft. per minute must travel through a 300 ft. long tunnel. How long will it take the train to travel through the tunnel?

@techradar I have a subscription with restricted cancellation terms. At 13.25 on the 14th I asked Claude, Gemini and ChatGpt:- "Is it still 13th March anywhere in the USA?" They all said no - when challenged none answered correctly. Claude was the most honest - the others kept digging.

A simple setting tweak and custom instruction can stop ChatGPT from ending every answer with follow-up prompts designed to keep the conversation going. techradar.com/ai-platforms-a…

@theepicmap Birmingham UK. Britains second largest city. City of a 1,000 trades. Was a massive industrial and manufacturing centre, second largest motor vehicle producer outside the USA in the early 1960s. Bankrupt in 2023.

What are some cities whose relevance has waned or faded completely?

@Thenationth More flexible lending rules? 40% loans not getting approved. 90-100% loan to value ratios, ~25% loss on second hand sales, ~20-40% further loss on repo auctions. Is that the sound of a can being kicked down the road or is it scraping the marginal buyers off the demand curve?

Thailand’s property market is expected to remain fragile in 2026, as weak economic growth, high household debt and tight mortgage lending continue to weigh heavily on housing demand. Industry leaders say purchasing power — especially among lower- and middle-income buyers and first-time homeowners — has dropped significantly, while banks remain cautious about approving housing loans, pushing rejection rates higher. Three property associations are urging the government to introduce urgent stimulus measures, including cuts to transfer and mortgage fees and more flexible lending rules, to help unlock domestic demand and stabilise the market. #TheNationThailand #TheNation #propertystimulus #urgentmeasures nationthailand.com/business/prope…

@techradar Any western banking apps run on it? Huawei phones are good - great battery life and camera, but zero UK banking apps on harmony OS making them impractical. The US told the UK not to use Huawei - perhaps now the US administration thinks we're worthless scum we can reconsider?

HarmonyOS expands from smartphones to PCs, showing tenfold growth potential, leveraging Huawei’s ecosystem, and reaching almost one billion devices. techradar.com/pro/an-obscure…

@business But we'll still be able to buy the same limited subset of last years stock at next years price from an authentic brand distributed via a politically connected, vertical restraints, conglomerate? A thousand identical outlets that offer no choice in size, colour, or specification.

Thai authorities seized more than 100,000 counterfeit items valued at nearly $1 million in a raid at a famous Bangkok shopping mall as part of steps to tackle intellectual property violations bloomberg.com/news/articles/…