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Public Universal Friend

@jamesinlimbo.bsky.social
138 followers 133 following 1.1K posts

Do not fold, bend, mutilate, or spindle.

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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 8h
Watching a programme on BBC 2 about John Simpson's 60 years at the BBC, and I'm greatly enjoying his description of being given ayahuasca by a Brazilian Indian tribe. "This six foot tall goldfish reached down and put its fin round my shoulder. It was wearing a straw hat, I should say..."
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
Good news: AI cured cancer on 23rd April 2029. Bad news: it hasn't cured the heart disease that you now have an elevated probability of suffering from, also smoking is still lame.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
Glad there are no existential risks (or non-existential ones) that they need to worry about!
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
These do not strike me as people with a healthy risk appetite.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Let's be fair to Mrs Moeggenberg, I'm sure that the Michigan Board of Education could benefit from such an expert in English grammar.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Absolutely, the incentives for everyone (including the $$$s) are towards low quality material, often with a loose relationship with the truth.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Nate Silver of all people has clocked this. Bear in mind this is engagement with *all* accounts, not just politics!
A bubble chart measuring total engagements for each of the largest accounts on x dot com. Red = Republican, blue = Democratic, grey = neither. The thing is a sea of red with dabs of occasional blue and a smattering of grey, with Elon Musk squatting as the biggest circle in the middle.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Of course, this being a Guardian article, there are a lot of people replying to this who have apparently transcended emotional attachment to material possessions. Who knew there were so many Buddhist masters on Bluesky dot com?
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
I've talked to people whose elderly parents are very keen for them to inherit a certain set of crockery or whatever, and without any disrespect they just can't feel the same about these objects that their parents do. It's the cruel truth of wrestling with mortality.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Conservative Catholicism in America is mostly several flavours of white ethnic grievance politics glued together, pt. 94.
A post from the Catholic League: 'privileged white people in Berkeley, California rushed to scratch Columbus Day in 1992; this was the 500th anniversary of Columbus discovering America. The ancestors of the Indians who lived in North America—the ones Columbus met—were themselves immigrants: they came from Asia. They were not indigenous to the soil the way an acorn is: They crossed the Bering Sea to get here.' Underneath is a clearly AI-generated photo of some anti-Columbus protestors.
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Richy Craven @richycraven.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
My online girlfriend was so shocked by the Ukraine drone strike on the Russian data centre that she's been too upset to message me all day.
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QuoProQuid @quoproquid.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
the novel carrie ends with an ominous note about other children like carrie appearing across the country, with a traumatized nation shocked by the violence and Congress struggling to make sense of it while King meant ESP, we've seen new carrie whites appear in a different form: the mass shooter
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
I'm beginning to suspect that Treorchy Comprehensive doesn't even exist at all. (All of the references are to vaguely credible-sounding books and articles, including a book about Roy Jenkins.)
The school has a system of prefects based on the model of Uppingham School. Prefects wear a gown modeled on the Oxford "commoners' gown", accented with red piping on reaching the Sixth Form. Prefects are addressed by staff and students as "Polly"; those who are made prefects in the Sixth Form are known as "Senators". Until 1997 prefects were exclusively male.The naming of the school is a subject of dispute, as the 'comprehensive' element is derived from its mission to ensure comprehension of all subjects, based on Gerald of Wales' ideals of education
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Ok, I'm going to say it - I think that this (from the Wikipedia page for Treorchy Comprehensive School) is total bollocks.
As a result of this decision Kirsty Retallick was appointed Headteacher pro tempore. It was agreed that this appointment would be delayed until an emergency session of the school's 'MagSap' (magnum sapientium conventus) committee had convened. The school's MagSap committee consists of exactly twelve revered retired teachers of the school, each of whom adopts the name of one of the Apostles according to the list in Luke 6:12-16. At the ratification meeting it was agreed that Retallick would be appointed, but that the cardinal red robes typically worn by the Headteacher would be withheld while her role remained pro tempore and that the acting Headteacher would be required to meet with a different one of the MagSap members once every month.
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Sam Wetherell @samwetherell.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
RIP Chris Wickham. Unlike so many historians who emphasise particularities and contingencies, he was the master of constructing grand, coherent, beautifully rendered worlds out of his evidence. This, from his 2021 Past and Present essay, is a masterpiece of historical writing.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Googled the name of a local restaurant. The website of said restaurant isn't in the first two pages of search results (but *is* linked in the dialogue box thing at the top, if you can see it). Incredible how Google have driven their main product off a cliff at high speed.
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Ada Palmer @adapalmer.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Interesting case of fraud by making automated songs then automated accounts to stream them, pocketing $8M in revenue. Few/no real listeners were diverted to listen to the GenAI songs, but the funds he pocketed drank from a zero sum revenue pool that meant real musicians were paid less.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Looking at the Wiki page for Princess Olga Romanoff, and found this inexplicably funny. Yeah, she was suggested as a future bride for Prince Charles by (checks notes) her mother.
Once suggested by her mother as a possible bride for her third cousin King Charles III, she married Thomas Mathew (born 8 July 1945, son of Francis Mathew former manager of The Times), in nuptials at the Orthodox Cathedral of the Assumption and at the Brompton Oratory on 1 October 1975.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Didn't post it at the time, but these are some workmen from British Gas repairing one of Britain's few remaining gas lights (around the back of Downing Street).
A British Gas van with a cherrypicker, repairing a gas lamp.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
I've just finished series 1 for the first time. It only gets better from here, right?
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
I had forgotten that Jeffrey Archer's libel trial involved one of the most bonkers judicial summings up. (See also the judge's remarks at the Jeremy Thorpe trial.)
The description the judge (Mr Justice Caulfield) gave of Mrs Archer in his jury instructions included: "Remember Mary Archer in the witness-box. Your vision of her probably will never disappear. Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Would she have, without the strain of this trial, radiance? How would she appeal? Has she had a happy married life? Has she been able to enjoy, rather than endure, her husband Jeffrey?" The judge then went on to say of Jeffrey Archer: "Is he in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel round about quarter to one on a Tuesday morning after an evening at the Caprice?"
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Great thread as always. Georgism was a fleeting influence on the Liberal Party in the UK in the 1910s, and a Georgist song is still the unofficial anthem of the Liberal Democrats. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lan...
en.wikipedia.org
The Land (song) - Wikipedia
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
As someone who has a cat, this is v plausible.
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
The “crusader march” would be more historically accurate if instead of going to the palestine fest they just robbed and torched a random church bsky.app/profile/unra...
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Elizabeth DeLoria II: THE GHOST DIMENSION @yourdadloves.me · 03/10/2026
A two panel meme of the Simpsons. The top panel has kirk van houten gesturing to a race care bed. The text reads "im an AI guy. How many local models do YOU run?" The bottom panel is homer with a pope hat photoshopped onto his head. The bottom text reads "I run the catholic church."
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Michael Caley @michaelcaley.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
this is by far the best "I quit my AI job over safety concerns" essay yet because it is the first one that is able to talk about safety concerns in practical terms and that understands "safety" as a topic with extensive literature in analogous fields www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
Two changes are urgently needed. First: AI companies need to rely more on the safety expertise that already exists in other fields. And second, before we create systems significantly more capable than the ones we have today, we need new science to ensure that more capable models (and their successors) will make safe choices when we aren’t looking.

Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster. Right now, AI companies don’t know how—but other people do. In a nuclear-power plant, the technical systems and rules people follow are set up so that, if equipment breaks or someone pushes the wrong button, we still won’t risk a meltdown. OpenAI and other labs are growing and deploying frontier AI with far less redundancy and rigor than this, even though the harm from an irreversible loss of control would be much greater than the harm from any single meltdown. Even short of a full loss of control, we could see autonomous swarms of AI agents that act without human permission. Imagine “rogue” agents that work like teams of hackers (for example, holding hospital computer systems for ransom) but never need to sleep.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Aptly for a song called 'Patient Zero', the tonally repetitive chorus of Taylor Swift's latest song has buried itself into my brain like some kind of parasitic worm. I fear I only have days to live.
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Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Nicholas Garland for the New Statesman 1974 on the Wilson renegotiation with the EEC - via Richard Johnson, QMUL
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Amol Rajan: I am a trusted broadcaster, so if you recruit me then I can lead the faithfuls off the scent :) The traitors:
static.klipy.com
Spongebob Meme: How Do We Kill Him?
ALT: Spongebob Meme: How Do We Kill Him?
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Ross Kemp on Celebrity Traitors.
Grampa Simpson points and screams 'death!'
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Continuity announcer immediately before The Traitors: '...and this is only possible because of the unique way the BBC is funded. Please, millennials, pay your licence fee. I know this is the only live TV you watch, but we're dying out here.'
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
If nothing else, seeing a second term Republican president flame out and head towards <30% approval makes me feel like I'm 16 again.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Ok, 'Republican wins his House election through fraud because one of the superpowered humans can hack voting machines' is a very Bush-era plotline.
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BCP Minus Context @bcpminuscontext.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
if we die, we die
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
My old church's social club had a steady roster of Irish c&w performers, probably most of their entertainment, though I wasn't sure what to make of the guy whose posters made liberal use of Confederate Flag...
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
The one good British Communist propaganda cartoon.
In imitation of a Guinness advert, a man chases after a seal in a top hat shouting 'my gawd! My wages!'
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
If there's one thing that social democratic/Christian democratic/centrist governments were really good at doing in the thirty years after WWII, it was building motorways.
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👻 Jack Djinn Wail 🧞 @jacktindale.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Every single time I see the "Every Fringe Event At Party Conference" graphic I howl.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
What this list demonstrates is that streaming has made Prestige Drama™ and sitcoms the dominant TV genres of our time. There are some documentaries and sketch comedy shows on there, but if you were to write a list for 20th century British TV they'd have a much greater place.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
The impression you get from Taylor Swift's latest songs is someone who is brimming with resentment but wants you to know that they are, in fact, extremely happy.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
For context, Facebook only began making these payments in 2016, and it's not as if they weren't already making a lot of money from organic ad revenue before then.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
One of the points at which social media started going wrong was when influencers/'creators'/total randoms started getting paid for posting. Not only does it create terrible incentives, it moved platforms from being peer-to-peer to a more top down.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Average headline about an employment tribunal: 'woman wins £100,000 because bosses didn't give her cake'. And then in paragraph 7: 'Mrs Brown, 42, was also regularly beaten around the head with a newspaper by her line manager and forced into a cupboard known as "The Chokey"'.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
"Oh, it allows for state surveillance and centralisation of power? Wow, this is the best!"
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Yeah, I was chatting with a guy in the pub a few months ago who was an electrician doing these kind of hours on the semi-regular on big projects. He was quite open about the fact that he took a fair bit of cocaine to make it happen. It didn't fill me with a lot of confidence...
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
The lack of contempt of court laws is actually one of the things which feels most alien about American culture. This 60 Minutes interview is taking place between the end of the first trial (which ended in a mistrial) and ahead of the retrial. It's being shown coast to coast!
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
It's a tragic case (basically: a Massachusetts woman suffering from post-partum psychosis killed her children and is on trial for murder, this is her now ex-husband), which grandstanding prosecutors, it all being televised, and the intensely polarised social media response have turned into a circus.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
The way that there is such a stark online gender divide on the Lindsay Clancy case - including this kind of pseudo-philosophical claptrap below - does not say anything great about the health of US society the incentives of social media.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Anyway, I'm not sure which is my favourite attempt by a large company to jump clumsily on the bandwagon of social progressivism - Burger King's 'tastes of woke' adverts or the slightly earlier 'Kendall Jenner ends American racism with Pepsi'. youtu.be/VogNNsQ3Gmw?...
A Burger King advert for its Rebel Whopper. The tagline is 'tastes of being woke'.
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Public Universal Friend @jamesinlimbo.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
To be clear, liberals knew that they were endorsing progressive messaging for self-serving reasons, but expected it to be enduring for structural reasons ('they need to appeal to Millennials who actually buy stuff!') rather than being - like every brand strategy - changed up every few years.
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