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Douglas Adams in 1978 predicted Terence Tao’s role as Vroomfondel in the modern AI debate: “We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
What a time to be alive! Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was practically a bible to my cold-war veteran physics-nerd 11-year-old self, discovering it during a Radio4 rebroadcast of the first series and subsequently stealing the paperback book from my sister (who didn’t really get it) – and I have the books, the…
Fediverse reactions
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“German flashlight forum TLF (taschenlampen-forum.de) will be taken offline permanently on September 16”
Yet another victim of “the little websites don’t matter in pursuit of our goals to crush anonymity and foreign platforms”
Fediverse reactions
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“Trump ally issues bill to exempt US websites from British regulators”
Looks like America finally has the possibility for a federal GRANITE act: Michael Rulli, a Republican congressman, wants to stop American courts from enforcing fines from Ofcom relating to the Online Safety Act https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/bill-us-ofcom-online-safety-regulators-h6jghd5fl
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CDT: “The British Public Reject
State Access to Private Online
Conversations”According to recent polling, the British public have deep reservations about their government’s access to their private conversations. https://cdt.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/2026-08-06-CDT-SS-UK-encryption-polling-brief-final.pdf
Fediverse reactions
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#RUSI / Royal United Services Institute makes batshit proposal to socially engineer “nationalism” in Britain to foster “total defence” / army signups
If you’re a Pratchett (or: Mary Shelley) reader you’ll know the most dangerous people are those clever enough to uncork some tremendous power — a monster, dragon, civic unrest — yet hubristic enough to believe they can also control that power; thus comes RUSI: “Following an increase in whole-of-society attacks, the UK government should deploy…
Fediverse reactions
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Eventually @andyburnham @10DowningStreet must choose whether he wants British children online to be “safe” or “educated”, ‘coz we can’t have “both”
This, attached below, is an inevitability. The UK Government strove for years to foster “tech” capability in British childen, and — although the “safety” community will push this as a “platform” responsibility — either we’re going to have to leave the kids ignorant of tech, or-else they will be coding-up their own VPNs & other…
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RE: 1 BILLION
It is interesting from a sociological perspective that some people will go to great lengths to explain how big 1+ billion is in the context of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg having too much money, yet will consider similar numbers to be trivial in the matter of filtering daily content uploads to seek evidence of…