Sign in

Simon Booth

@percysnoodle.bsky.social
23 followers 45 following 28 posts

An ugly bag of mostly cider

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Simon Booth
David Gerard @davidgerard.circumstances.run.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026
henstomper

oh my god the slot machine company says i have to keep putting coins in their machine or Im Gonna Get Left Behind. thats so scary. and it has to be true because they know more about slot machines than i do

oh my god the slot machine company says if we dont give them money to build the world's biggest slot machine the chinese are gonna build it first and win all the prizes. and then there wont be any prizes anymore
30127683977
Reposted by Simon Booth
Lance Parkin @lanceparkin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Tech employment. You can vividly see the collapses of the two Trump adminstrations as distinct archaeological layers. If you're wondering where the 'AI boom' in skilled tech jobs is, it's where it's always been: in the land of make-believe, you moron.
032
Reposted by Simon Booth
Patricia Aas 🐢🏳️‍🌈 @patigallardo.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
This collective LLM delusion is completely baffling to me. People are talking like truth, correctness, precision, performance, security… none of it matters anymore. Generating a lie is «good enough». Wtf is wrong with people? If correctness doesn’t matter, why would I pay you? A wrong answer is free
1121766
Simon Booth @percysnoodle.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
AI is a tool for replacing workers. It won’t destroy the world with killer robots or nukes. But it might be the reason that the next Stanislav Petrov isn’t there. Happy anniversary. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_So...
en.wikipedia.org
1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident - Wikipedia
001
Reposted by Simon Booth
Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com · 15/09/2026
The problem is that "while you weren't looking the tech industry was comprehensively taken over by a cult based around a piece of Harry Potter fanfic" is self-evidently an absolutely ridiculous claim that can't possibly have happened, which is a real problem given that it 100% did happen.
4429421011
Reposted by Simon Booth
Dr. SkySkull @drskyskull.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
This is just a spectacular unintentional self-own
Dude on Threads: If you hate on ai, you better be pretty damn good at whatever you're doing
10065511391
Reposted by Simon Booth
Matt Bors @mattbors.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
It was exactly ten years ago today, on my 33rd birthday, that I posted this comic online.
485297777667
Reposted by Simon Booth
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 13/09/2026
There are many many stories here. One of them, is that this is straight out of the tobacco & fossil fuel playbook. Have the same companies and billionaires fund "independent" institutes staffed by the same people, and "cite" their reports as "independent experts" showing "consensus."🧵

Ben Recht
@beenwrekt
I love that AI companies have decided METR should count as a third party.

(METR) is highlighted in the following post.

Embedded Evaluators. Each frontier AI company commits to giving ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators (such as METR), whose role is to verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess the alignment of not just completed Al models but training pipelines and processes. This is the key step for verifiability of any pacing commitments, and has precedent in the
banking industry, which sometimes involves regulatory "supervisors" embedded along with employees. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to this step now. We intend this to be part of a broader push to redouble efforts on our safety and
alignment work.
6219103
Reposted by Simon Booth
Grant @syncingsinking.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
This is just to say I have solved the open questions that were in your paper and which you were probably saving for your phd students Forgive me they were delicious so incentive-laden and followed so readily once your postdoc's drafts mysteriously found their way into my training data
4356115
Reposted by Simon Booth
Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
If Hugo continues to grow at this rate, by 2030 he will no longer fit in the barn. By 2050 he will have grown to the size of Godzilla and could crush humanity. But if we let the Chinese grow their own Hugo first that would be bad. This is why we must invest 100 trillion dollars in Hugo immediately.
1450296
Reposted by Simon Booth
Alice Roberts @profaliceroberts.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Glaciers collapse, disasters ensue. And then we’re expected to ignore all that because we can make fun AI images and google can badly summarise Wikipedia. Seriously. AI - Fuck off.
391688283
Reposted by Simon Booth
qntm @qntm.org · 08/09/2026
Ah, those classic OpenAI ethical boundaries you hear so much about them not having
cims.nyu.edu
2514
Reposted by Simon Booth
Henry Mance @henrymance.ft.com · 08/09/2026
162322612
Reposted by Simon Booth
Lance Parkin @lanceparkin.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Here's the third. www.bbc.com/news/article...
bbc.com
Jive Bunny And The Mastermixers creator John Pickles dies at 84
Tributes are paid to John Pickles, who formed the novelty pop act in Rotherham in 1989.
001
Reposted by Simon Booth
Una Mullally @unamullally.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
The battle to keep global heating from passing the agreed 1.5-degree threshold has been lost. This should be an era when human ingenuity works to save the planet from catastrophe. Instead the tech broligarchy is busy embarking upon ludicrous AI data centre “infrastructure” fuelled by coal and gas.
irishtimes.com
Battle to halt global heating at 1.5 degrees is lost - UN
Focus must now switch to limiting extent of overshoot, says United Nations' climate report
10286154
Reposted by Simon Booth
Joshua Eaton @joshuaeaton.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
“There’s a new Mr. Beast book.” You bolt awake in your workshop in Mainz. It’s 1450. You’re Johannes Gutenberg, and you’ve changed your mind. The future cannot come to pass. Your printing press must burn.
6979531450
Reposted by Simon Booth
Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
relatedly:
111126
Reposted by Simon Booth
Danny Fearns @dannyfearns.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Good morning Bluesky ☀️ This is one of the last coal powered sheep. The vast majority of UK sheep are now all electric ⚡️
Sheep grazing in fields, the one in the foreground with white smoke apparently coming out of its bottom
14172131754
Reposted by Simon Booth
That girl with The Posts @roodypatooti.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
sadclowncentral 
weird how no one ever comments on the absence of smells unprompted. the nose just isn't a topic of conversation unless it's urgent huh

sadclowncentral 
"it's dark in here" normal regular observation

"finally some quiet" relatable exclamation

"doesn't smell like anything in here" absolutely deranged sentence
337790
Reposted by Simon Booth
Dr Jo Kershaw @mthrjo.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Optimist: the cup is half full Pessimist: the cup is half empty British cook or baker: for goodness sake, why can’t you give quantities for dry ingredients by weight?
411124182
Reposted by Simon Booth
tef @tef.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
MANAGEMENT: We're going to eliminate skilled worker roles and replace them with lower paid jobs supervising the machine. Although productivity and quality will suffer, it'll be worth it to ensure you're that little bit more disposable. PROGRAMMER: Good thing i'm an expert on talking to the machine
312517
Reposted by Simon Booth
tef @tef.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
PROGRAMMER: They keep talking about dead children, but none of them understand what a tensor is. They're not thinking about the future, where none of the bad things happen, and good things happen instead because I have these tools. GUN OWNER: Tell me about it.
116719
Reposted by Simon Booth
tef @tef.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
FRONTIER LABS: We turned up the sycophancy because it produces addictive behaviour, and had to turn it down because of all the lawsuits. We promise to find a good midpoint between revenue and psychosis PROGRAMMER: Thank god technology is neutral FRONTIER LABS: We're building a god, actually
222347
Reposted by Simon Booth
tef @tef.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
CAPITAL: We have invented a machine that can cross picket lines PROGRAMMERS: I bet this will give us four day weekends. The left need to get behind this. What else can it do CAPITAL: Psychosis! Deepfakes! Propaganda! Plagerism! Yaml! Todo Apps! PROGRAMMERS: Run those last two past me again
4547142
Reposted by Simon Booth
Neil Miles @neilsmiles.com · 17/08/2026
29th August 1985 - An excited Michael Fish gets to deploy the rarely seen red number as the temperature gets up to an incredible 26 degrees in London!
521657713
Reposted by Simon Booth
Willow @rockshrimp.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
Every time I see someone talk about Claude I think about how they switched from female to male names as soon as they wanted the robots to seem like experts vs personal assistants.
11107023142
Reposted by Simon Booth
Ben Lesnick @banditloaf.wcnews.com · 15/08/2026
It’s the role she was born to play!
231864355
Reposted by Simon Booth
Woodo @woodo.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Lest we forget a guy just got hounded to death by the national media for what should have been an internal employee conduct matter regarding plagiarism in the same week Andy Burnham announced it's unavoidable & vital that young people be trained up in how to use an industrialised plagiarism machine.
123981
Reposted by Simon Booth
Paul Bassett Davies @thewritertype.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Dear government, don’t send startling, high-pitched alerts about wildfires to ordinary people's phones. Send them to the CEOs of fossil fuel companies and make them impossible to switch off until they stop the destructive plunder that's contributing to climate change.
18495222254
Reposted by Simon Booth
Lawrence Miles @lawrence-miles.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
"Minister for AI" is startling because it's a rare case of the Demonstrably Evil Thing getting the official title. Imagine a Minister for Diseases instead of Health, Illiteracy instead of Education, Propaganda instead of Culture, Euthanasia instead of Pensions, Russian Oligarchs instead of Housing -
1173
Reposted by Simon Booth
Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 12/08/2026
Because this is exactly what people in the tech industry are starting to sound like.
2506
Reposted by Simon Booth
Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 12/08/2026
If you lived in a world where smoking was returning in full force—through unethical, manipulative, and probably illegal tactics tobacco use was returning to 1960s levels—would you work within the tobacco industry to make it less bad? "Nicotine is an excellent ADHD drug so it can help accessibility!"
37624
Reposted by Simon Booth
Anne @anneb.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Looking in the card section and this font seems a bit off.
6678144988
Reposted by Simon Booth
Gretchen McCulloch @gretchenmcculloch.com · 09/10/2025
Higgledy piggledy Timothée Chalamet Has a name meriting Endless design Much like his forerunner Benedict Cumberbatch: Hexasyllabically, Easy to rhyme
tweet from childish branzino @absflora:
timothée chalamet is the new benedict cumberbatch in the sense that you can say ANYTHING and we know who you mean. tiffany chevrolet. timpanogos charlemagne. symphony cabernet. jiminy castaway.
522938839
Reposted by Simon Booth
Movies Silently @moviessilently.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
During the original Harry Potter boom, some librarians and academics expressed concern about kids wanting to read ONLY that. They were shouted down. "AT LEAST THEY ARE READING, THEY WILL GET A TASTE AND LOVE ALL READING SOON" Three decades on, I think we owe the librarians and academics an apology
226252
Reposted by Simon Booth
Dread and Rosie @rosiemund.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
It'd be really fucked up if we made a machine that made you less empathetic & more angry & also made it quick & easy & safe to maim & kill people & then we made life really difficult for anyone not using the machine & called anyone saying it was fucked up extreme & unreasonable. That'd be fucked up.
0215
Simon Booth @percysnoodle.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
TIL that Frybo and Farage were based on the same original character bsky.app/profile/fune...
030
Reposted by Simon Booth
Royal Astronomical Society @royalastrosoc.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
The Royal Astronomical Society is shocked and dismayed to hear that the UK's iconic Jodrell Bank Observatory is at risk of closure amid a slew of catastrophic budget cuts. Read our full statement here: ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre...
8387182
Simon Booth @percysnoodle.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
Just dropped a glass ramekin, which broke. When I saw that some of the glass might have gone into our kettle, I heard myself say out loud, “smashing”. Nobody else was there to see or hear it.
000
Reposted by Simon Booth
Malte Engeler @malteengeler.de · 23/07/2026
Very good to see that this position is becoming more and more visible within the left: When it comes to so-called "AI" there is nothing there for the left but infrastructure to dismantle. Thanks for writing it up, Hagen & Inge.
03915
Reposted by Simon Booth
Andrea Bellemare @dreabells.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
AI companies are destroying our collective shared history to put it into their slop buckets, because the slop they push out would destroy their models if they tried to re-input it
Text reads: This bookseller said his inventory is full of rare, foreign language, and low circulation books, meaning that if they are destroyed in the process of becoming training data, they'll be even harder to obtain.
10987678
Reposted by Simon Booth
tante @tante.cc · 21/07/2026
"I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and it’s impossible to have rational conversations with them about it." AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
719460
Reposted by Simon Booth
Henri @henriwords.com · 21/07/2026
(4)
News > UK > UK Politics

Nigel Farage hits out
1224597
Reposted by Simon Booth
shaunt @shaunvids.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
"why does the UK change leaders so often?" there are diminishing returns wrt how long each vessel can house thatcher's spirit. by the end of the century we'll be getting through 1000 prime ministers a day
5448901050
Reposted by Simon Booth
tante @tante.cc · 19/07/2026
Nothing ages worse than defining a minister based on a crumbling hype. Did the Tony Blair institute give them that dumb idea? It's as if Labour just didn't want to govern anymore.
55816
Reposted by Simon Booth
Tim Ellis, TDSB Ward 2 candidate 🍁 @djdynamic.ca · 08/07/2026
One reason people don't trust AI is that it's being pushed on us by obviously evil people doing obviously evil things at their obviously evil companies
7475220
Reposted by Simon Booth
Ben Guilfoy @bkguilfoy.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
"Remember to always check the output," they tell me. If I have to read the original document to make sure the summary is accurate, then the AI is a *useless and pointless* extra step, and I can never seem to convince anyone at work of this.
15435152
Reposted by Simon Booth
Gillian Brockell @gillianbrockell.com · 06/07/2026
There's a part in the book "Careless People" where the author beats Zuck at Settlers of Catan, and he is absolutely wrecked by it. Someone pulls her aside to explain everyone else has been letting him win for years. I think about this a lot re: why tech bros think everyone will love AI chatbots.
24122423715
Reposted by Simon Booth
Naomi Klein @naomiaklein.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Everybody in the "climate space" (which means everyone on earth...) needs to understand these mind-blowing figures. Google's "total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025." In ONE year. The AI corporate arms race is eating the world.
7043292446
Reposted by Simon Booth
Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
NEW: Workers across industries say that AI-obsessed bosses are creating deeply toxic and chaotic work environments, with some staffers sharing that they feel as though their manager or employer isn't living in reality anymore due to endless AI validation. futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
Bosses Are Becoming Obsessed With AI, Using It to Make Every Decision, Barraging Their Employees With Nonsensical ChatGPT Directives, and Even Asking It Who to Fire
AI-obsessed executives and managers are creating a distinct new type of toxic work environment for the slop era, workers told us.
18989334