iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

bit disappointed that our wannabe-god masters haven't turned their frontier models onto the question of God's existence yet

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

newrepublic.com/post/215532/... lol isn't there a story about him, what, fifty years ago, having some sculptures demolished on a building because he heard they were going to be protected? truly hell's property developer

newrepublic.com

Photographer Exposes Trump’s Kennedy Center Plan—and It’s a Bombshell

And a witness spotted a forklift repeatedly crashing into the building’s pillars.

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

there were obviously 1,000 other things that led to where NP has ended up, but she should be counted among those for whom being criticised for uttering even partially terfy views led to a hardening and swift rightward spin

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

It is odd that the circumstances of the development of a possibly transformative technology of abundance, the stuff of past utopias, are a source of such profound dread

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

tom watson joining palantir lol ffs

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Gregk Foley @gregk.co.uk · 18/09/2026

Anyway

Tom Watson ‹ @tom _watson
X.com
After six wonderful years at UK Music, I'm joining Palantir UK as Senior Vice President.
Palantir is the most interesting company on the planet, doing work of real consequence: helping Britain and its allies defend themselves, helping police protect our citizens and helping NHS staff get patients treated and home sooner.

London is comfortably its largest centre outside the US, home to more than one in six employees, the highest proportion among the world's largest technology companies.
We have challenges. Some criticism is propaganda. Some raises legitimate questions about large technology companies and sovereign control. Both require answers.

Part of my role will be to correct false information while working with our engineers to ensure privacy, security and respect for sovereignty are at the heart of everything we do.
FOUNDATIONAL SOFTWARE OF TOMORROW.
DELIVERED TODAY
EST. 2003
EUR A HQ / LONDON UK
PALANTIR.COM YUK
PALANTIR TECHNOLOGIES
INC.
ONBOARDING
TOM WATSON
A CONVERSATION ON VALUES, TECHNOLOGY AND MISSION

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

see I want to, *need* to believe this argument, but by this point I don't see why the statistical patterns of what humans call 'novelty' – apparently ineffable, to us – aren't just going to be crunched in the next few years, months even

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

by a couple of ways of measuring, this was the very peak

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Daniel C. Blight @danielcblight.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

***URGENT PLEASE SHARE*** University of Brighton management have announced today that they ‘give notice of termination of all collective agreements’. This is a fundamental erasure of workers' rights. Management have announced the termination of all contractual documents, which includes:

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

www.ft.com/content/410b... everything I read about this Ben Delo guy makes him sound like one of those autistic teenage boys that get sucked down a rabbit hole of extreme politics because they have trouble understanding human nuances, except he's got billions of pounds

ft.com

Ben Delo: the crypto billionaire who has given Reform UK £44mn

The donor is focusing on what he calls the ‘fight for national renewal’

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

alright do Voynich next if you're so clever

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Prem Thakker ツ @premthakker.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

New: Macklemore says Robert Kraft — who owns Gillette Stadium, where Macklemore & Ed Sheeran were to perform later this month — called Sheeran. Kraft rallied other owners together behind an ultimatum for Sheeran: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you won't be allowed in our venues.

I'm not sure how to start this. So I'm going to speak from the heart and share the truth. Ed Sheeran and his team have made the decision to remove me from The Loop tour.
But before I get into it, I want to say something that should be obvious. In this moment I think it matters. I am not a victim. Ed Sheeran is not a victim. Pink is not a victim. We have careers, money, opportunities, safety and audiences around the world. Whatever consequences any of us face for what we say, we get to go home to our families.

The victims are the Palestinian people. The men, women and children who have been killed, starved, displaced and forced to live through unimaginable violence. More than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza alone. People are being killed today, and people will be killed tomorrow. I want to make sure that as I tell this story, we don't lose sight of that.

Ed is my friend. I've known him for 13 years. We've shared late nights, studio sessions and stages. He has this infectious magic about him that I've grown to love. I consider him a brother. And because of that, we've had some difficult conversations this past week. The type of talks rooted in love and respect for one another that still end in a place of fundamental disagreement. Nothing I'm writing here is out of spite or because I want to tear down his character. But as I told Ed multiple times on the phone, our friendship can't change my responsibility to tell the truth about what happened.

Last Monday, in the middle of all the media attention surrounding Pink and what I said at MetLife, Ed told me that Robert Kraft called him. We were scheduled to play Gillette Stadium later this month, which is owned by the Kraft Group. Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other
stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.

Ed was in …

What I said at MetLife I have been saying on stages around the world for almost three years. So why is it an issue now? Because now I'm sharing a stage with one of the biggest artists in the world, in some of the biggest stadiums in America. At a certain level of exposure, "Free Palestine" becomes too much of a risk. If I kept doing the shows, saying Free Palestine, with Ed implicitly supporting it, the crowd getting loud and showing undeniable support for Palestinian liberation, what artist might speak out next? The stage becomes resistance. Maybe that's why this time it became so important to silence me.

And one of the most effective ways to enforce that silence has been to weaponize the accusation of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real. And that is exactly why the word matters too much to be used as a shield against criticism of the Israeli state. When criticizing Israel, opposing Zionism or saying "Free Palestine" gets conflated with hatred of Jewish people, it doesn't protect Jewish people. It protects Israel from accountability.

I hope this isn't the end of my relationship with Ed.
Thirteen years of friendship doesn't disappear because of one painful disagreement. I hope we both continue listening, studying what is happening in Palestine and wrestling with what neutrality means in a moment like this. My door will always be open to continuing that conversation.

When my brother Omar was doing the subtitles for the video I posted from MetLife, I thanked him. He told me there's a phrase in Arabic:
لا شكر على واجب
"La shukra ala wajeb." There is no thanks for a duty.
That stayed with me. Because that's what this has become for me and millions of others around the world. A duty. Not something deserving of praise or gratitude. Not brave. Human.

Who is winning the internet, who is getting canceled, who gets to play the stadium and who doesn't, all of it becomes so small when held against what we are actually witnessing in Gaza and the West Bank. An entire people be…

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

truly amazing that he managed to come up with the least reassuring thing he could possibly say

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I know we're supposed to laugh and say 'it's all bollocks', but I have this image in my head of, not quite armageddon, but, say, an AI swarm switching off maybe a hospital or what have you while working towards something else, a bunch of people dying, and suddenly vast liability right in the open

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

it's kind of grimly ironic that now long-dead media theorists were talking about the 'end of reality' a good five decades ago, when ordinary people were spending a few hours a day watching television channels

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

beginning to think that it's only a matter of time before a really big accident / incident / mass-casualty event / whatever you want to call it, resulting from loss of control of a frontier AI, actually occurs

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James Butler @piercepenniless.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

In more 'govern the country you actually have' news: minister finger-wags at nation with spectacularly historically overachieving cultural industry that they should all be engineers instead, and that this would be personally as well as economically fulfilling.

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Musicology Duck @musicologyduck.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

i saw some commentary on here about how one never sees Charlie Kirk anymore in a serious context, and it made me feel the need to take y’all on a short walk through the halls of congress one year after his death i only made it past about half of their offices bc I only had like 40 mins at lunch but

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

not particularly encouraging words from the AI researcher here, doesn't sound like they have enough imagination to describe the world behind the lines on their graphs

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

saw this, and immediately thought of the onion's headline on Hitler's selbstmord: "Ravaging of Europe ‘A Desperate Cry for Help,’ Say Therapists."

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

lol so openAI have been 'stealing' proofs left right and centre

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

the shady argument aimed at Miliband today, i.e. "you're secular and thus not Jewish enough" did rely on something I think that the left does, sometimes, not give enough credit to, which is the *perception of safety* in a population who suffered a vast attempted extermination

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flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Jonathan was hoping against all hope for a better Israel when I started reading his columns in 2002; he’s been doing thoughts and prayers for the last 24 years through one crazy, murderous, land-grabbing government after another and bless him, he’s still just holding on for a hero even now.

BBC Newsnight O @BBCNewsnight
X.com
"Netanyahu and his allies, they love fighting a kind of Millwall campaign - 'everyone hates us and we don't care'"
The Guardian's Jonathan Freeland says the UK
Government sanctioning West Bank
settlements could be used by supporters of the Israeli PM to project a message of "the world is against us, therefore stick with us" in the upcoming election.

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

just started thinking about what the hours, maybe days, when a (cough) rogue AI (cough) decides to kill us all will actually be like

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

forgive me for having utterly zero interest in what Behr has to say

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Patrick Andelic @pkandelic.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I went back to listen to it and it’s genuinely quite shocking.

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Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @mayor.nyc.gov · 08/09/2026

For years, New Yorkers have demanded access to City records about the lasting health impacts of the horrific September 11th attacks. For years, they have been denied and ignored. That ends today. nyc.gov/sept11docs

nyc.gov

September 11 Docs

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Hari Kunzru @harikunzru.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

The new American oligarchs have completed the multigenerational project of reversing all the gains of the 20th century labor movement finance.yahoo.com/news/super-r...

finance.yahoo.com

Super rich’s wealth concentration surpasses Gilded Age levels

America's richest of the rich just passed the Rockefeller-Carnegie cohort in wealth concentration, according to Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman.

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

having to re-read some of my old work… I wrote this about ten years ago, about a time 60 years ago… I was trying to be pertinent but really it would have been better to have been more wrong

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

It is interesting – you often see data people like JBM at the ft saying "actually people aren't doing all that badly in terms of wealth" etc etc, hey ho, but the fact that all this hatred is doing so well right now, well, normally you'd look directly at the economics but that's confusing

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flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

T minus 435 days, and counting down.

Opening sequence of the movie Children of Men, with the date: 16th November 2027

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

so are we going to see the Bauhaus shut down by the fash for the second time in a century? (Dessau is in Saxony-Anhalt, and the AfD have *already* been making noises about the modernist degenerates etc etc)

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

rumours saying an AI model has "solved the Navier-Stokes regularity problem" (ie one of the Millennium Prize problems) and I am increasingly reminded of this bit from Douglas Adams – "what's the point of arguing whether god exists if this machine just gives you his bleeding phone number?"

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flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Aside from anything else, this is quite a spectacular bit of needlessly being a complete wanker about it, when asked a reasonable question.

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

given all that's going on, pretty openly, do we think more private american or russian state money is funding these guys and their operation?

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Not Anyone You Know @slowcrush.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

An interesting test of the new law on protests targeting key national infrastructure

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

the linked thread here goes into detail about YET ANOTHER example of rich american maniacs trying to push fascist ideas in the UK

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I wrote a book that was largely about a time (60 years ago) when everyone was expecting technology and automation to lead to a drastically smaller working week… but capitalism doesn't work like that

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I think it's wonderful that talented young musicians in the internet age are able to push their technique to limits hitherto almost inconceivable, but I wish that they wouldn't then decide to play Sorabji www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEro...

youtube.com

WORLD RECORD: Yi-Chung Huang (24yo) - Sorabji: Symphonic Variations (2026 live) LEARNED IN 130 DAYS!

YouTube video by Maria Callas’ No. 1 fan

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

this reminds me – I still need to put together the slides I told myself to do for this year, that list these new studies suggesting that people who learn with LLMs don't actually learn anything

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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

this bond market rumbling sounds ominous

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