iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Blimey, that's a bit trigger-happy of Dunt

The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

While the writer of this article is entirely correct in their choice of adjective here, I can't help but think that this is accidental www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Guardian article extract: "...But it’s becoming abundantly clear with every new alarmist study that we need saving from ourselves when it comes to our phone addiction..."

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Proof by tabloid synthesis: a house worth GBP1.5 million is definitely not a mansion, but a house worth GBP2 million definitely is one

Daily Mirror: A successful banker has been banned from the City after dodging almost £6,000 in train fares on the commute from his plush £2million mansion.

Evening Standard: Chancellor set to rule out £1.5m mansion tax that ‘makes no sense’ in London
John Healey was reportedly proposing reducing the threshold from £2 million to £1.5 million

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I see where this person is coming from (it's from radical zoomer spaces), but for almost any sensible definition of the left as a whole it's the other way round. There aren't mainstream left politicians demanding that Jews be banned from sport or toilets! (the correct answer is tolerate neither)

we have to tolerate mild antisemitism on the left' generates less outrage than 'we have to tolerate mild transphobia on the left'."

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Getting to use this twice in two days, what a treat! bsky.app/profile/jame...

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I like the NYT's new feature of asking Michael Caine to describe the latest news

NYT email - "A bloody attack in the cockpit of a flight to Israel"

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Would be a massive nostalgia hit if these were in the 2000 Virgin West Coast livery

British Rail Class 87 with MK2D coach at the Leeds NRM

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Enjoying the high speed train frontages at the National Railway Museum

A low-angle selfie of a man with light brown hair and a grey goatee, wearing a black coat, in front of the huge, glossy white bulbous nose of an original Japanese Shinkansen at the National Railway Museum. An orange-lit round window sits on the left and the shell rests on a riveted blue steel base.

The same man in front of the blunt yellow and blue nose of a British Rail InterCity 125 (HST) power car at the National Railway Museum. The cab windscreen with its wiper is above him, with a black ventilation grille and headlamps behind him

The same man in front of the rounded yellow and white nose of an original Eurostar power car at the National Railway Museum. Two headlamps glow on either side of an orange perforated panel. Part of a tunnel-boring machine is visible to the right, with blue roof trusses overhead.

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The National Railway Museum knew what they were doing

A vintage enamel advertising sign in a slim silver frame, mounted on an exposed brick wall. Bright yellow background with bold black lettering shadowed in red reads "Ask for Ringer's Shag" and, below, "The Old Welsh Favourite". The enamel is worn and scratched, with rust along the edges and a small rust-brown chip near the middle of the "R" and "G" letters of "Ringer's".

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Genuinely impressive levels of Accor membership welcome gift at the Glasgow Ibis

Two cans of Irn Bru and two Tunnocks tea cakes

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

They've also put out one of the cute retro livery BA planes to distract us

British Airways A319 in vintage BEA livery

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Our plane might be three hours late but at least the Airbus factory and the hill are scenic

View from the bar at Belfast City Airport

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

🎶 Me and the girls are behaving responsibly at the airport

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Congratulations to Saffers and Italians for living up to the stereotype (from www.crikey.com.au/2026/09/17/w...)

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

🎶 Let's start a war Start a nuclear war At the GAY SPAR, GAY SPAR, GAY SPAR

A Spar convenience store in central Dublin with rainbow flag decoration

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Well done to @diffractiongrating.bsky.social for spotting that all the BA Embraers that live at London City have LCY rego numbers - I respect this conceit. Anyone know any other airlines that do fun things with their rego numbers?

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

They literally ran out of normal glasses (the barman, although overwhelmed, was very nice)

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

In order to upset everyone from all camps and be damned to every possible kind of hell, living or otherwise, I got the bad art machine to draw Rococo's Basilisk

A lavish Rococo portrait of a basilisk presented as an 18th-century aristocrat, reclining amid gilded cartouches, shellwork, roses, ribbons, pearls, feathers and excessive decorative confidence. The reptile wears an expression of serene social superiority while surrounded by cherubs, classical statuary, a white peacock, ornamental inscriptions and a discreetly beribboned skull.

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Absolutely delighted to discover that Gordon Ramsay's new London restaurant actually offers an Idiot Sandwich

Restaurant menu
Gordon Ramsay at Sea Containers

SIGNATURE DISHES

GORDON RAMSAY £26 IDIOT SANDWICH FLIGHT
Mini beef, fish & vegetable sandwiches, fries, pickles & signature sauces

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Always interesting when you get a story which is an insane political beat-up and it's entirely unrelated to the writer's job www.afr.com/policy/econo...

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Of course the first known English joke is a wine aunt joke

The oldest known British joke dates from the 10th century. Found in a book of Anglo-Saxon poetry, it reads: ‘what hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? Answer: A key’.

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

The problem is (see QT and image, although Keynes probably never phrased it quite like that in reality)

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

The blog is written by an LLM ("the core issue isn't X but Y... here's why that matters"), I'm not saying this affects its claims' truth, just that it's quite funny

The core issue isn’t whether chips wear out faster than accounting suggests. It’s whether the market structure being formed is fueled by accounting conventions that obscure true long-run economics, allowing incumbent coalitions to establish customer lock-in at the application layer before true costs become visible. In other words, the accounting subsidy creates a window of roughly three to six years where reported costs are artificially low. After that, the overlapping depreciation schedules catch up to operational reality. Here’s why this timing matters:

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Very funny typo - but also is clearly a typo and one I've done many times on the phone (a long press on "delete" deletes the previous word, a long press on "m" inserts a slash) - not believing Huckabee on this is weird. Also looks nothing like LLM text

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

"These days, if you say you're English, you get arrested and thrown in jail."

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I think you can say that Donna in that period carried on like Roisin did in the early 2020s, and being an Evangelical Black lady of her time is unfortunate but forgivable. The timeline is weird for Roisin, she was a bit problematic for years and then just exploded last October

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

More prosiacally, two years ago LLMs flat-out weren't good enough at all to do this, whereas now "put this in Wordpress/Hubspot markup with correct internally linked footnotes" just works, as does "convert this BrE piece to AmE and flag any ambiguiities" (quote from www.johnband.org/blog/2024/03...)

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Always wild to see the Nigerian HSTs, glad they're getting some use! (from Chris Mazda - www.facebook.com/permalink.ph... )

Crowded Lagos commuter train carriage. Passengers fill every transverse-fitted green-and-grey seat while a man in a white polo shirt stands holding one of the bright yellow hanging straps; refurbished ex-British Rail Mark 3 stock. Photo by Chris Mazda.

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Graun's epic units fail aside, the saga also shows that anyone claiming that the anti-datacentre moral panic is only about opposition to hyperscale AI training data centres is simply lying. As here, it fully encompasses the traditional sort. More useful background: www.reddit.com/r/london/com...

Then owners, Truman Estates, developed a much broader master plan. In August 2024, they submitted planning applications for offices, retail, leisure, public space, housing and a 5,200 m², 3MW (megawatt) data centre. In the planning process, the data centre was described as quite small. For comparison, hyperscale facilities, which are now used to power AI, can be tens or even hundreds of megawatts.

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The Pub-Liking Universal Friend @johnb78.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Once again, we see that the only thing that could reasonably be called "AI psychosis" is the condition experienced by the people who pathologically hate it

Unhinged anonymised Bluesky post:

"I was sad and pissed about Outlier, but then I got this response to my 'fuck off for using AI' message, so now my entire attitude is 'Good riddance, you pathetic, rationalizing sack of fermented hyena vomit.' Bald-face-lying (not even going to COUNT the blatant lies), excuse-riding fucknugget."

Below that is a dark-mode screenshot of an email reply. The email reads:
"Greetings! I respect your point of view, and I'm publicly upfront about using AI. I'm not hiding anything. Almost all are not. It's your choice to decide which games you want to support and which you don't. All software today is using AI to code. Every business is forced to use it. Programmers are using AI to code, they don't hand code anymore. It would be impossible to compete, and the cost of programming by hand too high and too slow. It would not be feasible economically and no amount of support from players would cover that. This is a hobby of mine not a business, I do it for the love of tha game and for bringing joy to people across the world. People still want to hate on it, and that's fine. If you boycott this game that's fine, but you are only kidding yourself - everything you use today is using AI whether anyone likes it or not. No hard feelings. Have a wonderful day!"
Below a divider, it quotes the recipient's earlier message from September 1: "You have openly and publicly rationalized using 'AI.' I am therefore cancelling my account. If you choose to stop using 'AI' entirely, let me know, and I will consider coming back. Otherwise, you are supporting companies and individuals who are frankly villains, and I refuse to be any more party to that than I have to be. (And if you reply to this message with 'AI' slop, I will block the sending email address and NEVER return.)"

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