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Douglas Murphy

@entschwindet.bsky.social
836 followers 672 following 896 posts

I spend my days in an architecture school I've written some books Chatting about music, culture, politics etc etc

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Reposted by Douglas Murphy
flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
This is, I think, the data equivalent of every politician going on television naked and telling you that fire is wet and shite is shampoo, while you try to ignore their crinkled arses and saggy ballsacks
NEW: Home Office stats released today reveal that arrests for "terrorist-related activity" in the year ending June 2026 were up 1,553% on last year and 94% of the arrests (3,630 of 3,867) were linked to showing support for Palestine Action.
Figure 1.1: Arrests for terrorist-related
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
d'you reckon?
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
ok disregarding the crime and punishment aspect for a second, but my god is this not the maddest thing you could possibly experience – you get the injection, 100% expecting that this is the end of you, and then you WAKE UP, execution botched
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
file this under 'fascism is at least partially about transcendental boredom'
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
thought this feature in the FT, on the people who make big money on betting markets, was interesting and also very indicative of the moment we are in. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...
giftarticle.ft.com
Polymarket’s Alpha traders
In a private group chat, an elite crew of prediction-market bettors turn elections, wars and disasters into ‘free money on the floor’
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
you've been a fan of his for a while, right? I can remember you praising him back on the other site what feels like donkeys ago
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
it always astounds me how quickly renaissance architecture went from "we must accurately revive the ancient forms" to "we must fuck around with the ancient forms as weirdly as possible"
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
why the rope?
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Reposted by Douglas Murphy
Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com · 01/10/2026
A bad day for this person
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
we have talked about this!
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
just read this a few minutes ago… wild, even for Kirk's standards
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
and I do find it odd that it's precisely through DM that I came to know you all
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
yeah I felt a bit too 'forward' saying this the other day, but from what little I recall I would include her in this sad milieu bsky.app/profile/ents...
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
(fwiw the few moments that I have gotten actual pleasure from interacting with an LLM are when I've said "I have a vague memory of something I saw when I was a child, it was like this?!?!" and it got the answer right away)
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nin... it must be more than 30 years ago that I read it but yeah here we go… "overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out"…
en.wikipedia.org
The Nine Billion Names of God - Wikipedia
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I seem to remember an Arthur C Clarke short story about a computer working out all possible names for god, and as it reaches the end of the programme, the stars begin to go out
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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
yeah that's right, it was in 1980 placesjournal.org/article/post...
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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
bsky.app/profile/ents... I mean, it's all doing a fucking number on my sense of, um, existential security, but if the PR matters at all, they've really really really fucked it
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
it's all there, all the end-times AI chat, it's not new, it just… might well be happening now
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
lol I just remembered this onion article from 1999!!! theonion.com/i-believe-th...
theonion.com
I Believe The Robots Are Our Future
Though we live in uncertain times, we must not forget that the most important thing in life is the legacy we will leave behind for future generations. It is not for our sake, but for theirs, that we m...
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
one other thing is that DM, the other half of that lawsuit, was actually the guy who first introduced me to Owen, Nina, and Mark… when they all fell out and DM left the UK for years, I think I was one of the last people to see him… years later… oh hello who's this?
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
right
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
the last time I saw her in person was at the RCA
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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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Reposted by Douglas Murphy
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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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
www.ft.com/content/2285... this is a fairly brutal look at the scumbags and their money
ft.com
US billionaires line up to bankroll Republicans’ election push
Ultra-wealthy overwhelmingly back Donald Trump’s party over Democrats as money floods into midterms race
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Reposted by Douglas Murphy
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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Reposted by Douglas Murphy
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
lol
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
coming from Jenners that's high praise
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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
thought this comment was actually quite perceptive – maybe the realisation is not quite "it's going to imminently kill us all" but rather "there's *literally* no way to control what it does on the way to a goal"
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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
👀
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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
yes that is a very good point but of course by a certain theory of who and what "counts" that doesn't
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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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Douglas Murphy @entschwindet.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Trumpdämmerung?
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Reposted by Douglas Murphy
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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Reposted by Douglas Murphy
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
innit
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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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