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Steve Walker

@steve-walker.bsky.social
237 followers 366 following 646 posts

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities". Voltaire, 1765, Questions sur les miracles

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Reposted by Steve Walker
Dr Katie Twomey @k2mey.eurosky.social · 28/09/2026
This is quite cool. My university is the first organisation in the world to force Microsoft to allow us to turn off copilot summaries in Word 365, after a backlash against it from staff (including, very vocally, me). That cannot have been easy for our heroic IT people so hats very much off to them!
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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The response when progressive policies that help millions of people are proposed... "How will you pay for it?" The response when the richest 1% ask for tax cuts, or banks ask for bailouts, or defense contractors ask for more contracts... "How much do you need?" It doesn't have to be this way.
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Jamie Smart @jamiesmart.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Can’t eat a sandwich until you subscribe to sandwiches. Can’t eat today’s sandwich until it has applied daily sandwich updates. Sandwich now has adverts even though you paid for ad-free sandwich. Can pay again to have less sandwich adverts. Now you can eat the sandwich, but it’s smaller.
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Ian Boudreau @ianboudreau.com · 26/09/2026
Amazingly, no one was responsible
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Steve Walker @steve-walker.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Oooops...
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Prem Sikka @premnsikka.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Declassified journalists banned from Labour conference – again. A Trumpian policy started by Keir Starmer. Burnham can't make a fresh start without getting rid of the previous advisers. Democracy means accepting scrutiny, even when it is uncomfortable.
declassifieduk.org
Declassified journalists banned from Labour conference - again
Labour MPs have condemned the ‘Trump-like’ decision, saying party is ‘bang out of order’
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Greatest trick AI leaders have pulled is convincing many people—especially influential people in govt, media, and business—that their software is intelligent, independent, yet never culpable. Humans build it, humans deploy it, but no one bears responsibility for the things that happen when they do.
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Steve Walker @steve-walker.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Brilliant!
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Steve Walker @steve-walker.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It's unclear how well it deals with darker skin tones, apparently...
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Seb Schmoller @schmoller.net · 23/09/2026
This point is well made by @brokenbottleboy.bsky.social here: brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/bbc-news-d...
brokenbottleboy.substack.com
BBC News, ‘Danny Tommo’ and the dinghy attack that disappeared
While the rest of the media – even the very worst parts – report on Daniel Thomas’ actions, BBC News fails to give its audience the facts.
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LAFAYETTE @lastudiolafayette.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
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Steve Walker @steve-walker.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Just caught the last ep of Attenborough's Life on Earth. Absolutely as brilliant as I remember it being. Up there with the very best TV ever made. Off to watch the rest on iPlayer.
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Paul Lewis @paullewismoney.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Too big and important to tax, part 94 bit.ly/4jbxpa6 betting boss says don’t tax betting. Toys, Throw. Pram. There’ll be a lot more of this over the next 39 days!
bit.ly
Britain’s top taxpayer cuts sports funding in gambling tax row
Betfred tycoon Fred Done says he will no longer financially support rugby league and threatens to pull horseracing sponsorship if Labour hikes levies
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Anti-Reform @antireform.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
"Proscribe the extreme far right groups before it's too late" via The UK Against Hate
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LabourStart @labourstart.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
GLOBAL: Outsourcing workers gather in Stockholm to build power and shape the rules on AI uniglobalunion.org/news/outsour...
uniglobalunion.org
Outsourcing workers gather in Stockholm to build power and shape the rules on AI
Union representatives from across the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector met in Stockholm on 16–17 September 2026 for a two-day forum on organizing, collective bargaining and the regulation of ...
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Ruth Watson @ruthwatson.eurosky.social · 18/09/2026
Piddington. The racist Sandford.
static.klipy.com
Hot Fuzz: Simon Pegg's 'Oh, I see. It's fascism.'
ALT: Hot Fuzz: Simon Pegg's 'Oh, I see. It's fascism.'
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Michelle says: Be kind. Always. ❤️ @snarkysillysad.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Real Betis players walked out with the 11 oldest club *socios* (members, all over 80) as matchday mascots before their La Liga game against Getafe on September 17, 2026. Part of Real Betis' "Elderly Week" (*Semana de los Mayores*) initiatives. #AGoodPlace
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Paul Bernal @paulbernal.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Parents. Your kids have a right to privacy. That includes privacy *from you*. It’s not an absolute right, but it exists. The default should be *not* to invade their privacy.
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Dr Carole McCartney 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ @ctmccartney.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Absolutely. If you work in HE these days, a meeting with managers and/or HR should NEVER be considered "informal". Always take union support!
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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 14/09/2026
If you give workers instructions that reveal your ignorance, they might roll their eyes at you and make you feel bad about yourself. Even if they restrain themselves in the moment, they might make fun of you in the break-room later.
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Sue Me @superberg.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Nothing to see here 👇👇👇 Donald Jr's Wedding was bankrolled by a Putin-Linked Russian Oligarch ..."but Hunter's laptop....." www.propublica.org/article/dona...
propublica.org
Donald Trump Jr.’s Wedding Bankrolled by Putin-Linked Russian Oligarch
The oligarch, Umar Kremlev, spent hundreds of thousands on expenses like renting out a private island. He appears to have met Trump Jr. only recently, but he attended the intimate wedding with a large...
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Private Eye Magazine @privateeyenews.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
No sooner had Burnham lamented unaccountable outsourcing than contracts worth £250m were announced for the outsourcing of civil service training to EY. Expect some heavy lobbying from its bosses and from other outsourcers to keep the gravy train on track.
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Steve Walker @steve-walker.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Thread
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John Denham @jydenham.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I do find odd that we all apparently enjoy the right to enter a hotel uninvited, go to the guest floors, knock on the doors of complete strangers on the grounds that they are not white - and yet not commit any offence.
bbc.co.uk
Group entered hotel of Pakistan cricketers mistaken for migrants
Protesters congregated at a Portsmouth hotel after false rumours that a coach of migrants had arrived.
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Paul Bernal @paulbernal.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
“Legitimate concerns” latest. The entire nation should be ashamed of how far we’ve fallen. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
Group entered hotel of Pakistan cricketers mistaken for migrants
Protesters congregated at a Portsmouth hotel after false rumours that a coach of migrants had arrived.
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Steve Walker @steve-walker.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
No shit, Sherlock. As someone once said.
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Robert Saunders @robertsaunders.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Intrigued to read that the Dublin Vegetarian Association in the early 20th century was run by a Mr Ham, Mrs Joynt and Mrs Hogg.
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Reform Party UK Exposed @reformexposed.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
11 councillors have gone from Reform UK this week alone. 6 by-elections this week and Reform UK didn’t even achieve 2nd in any. And that’s before we mention the scandals. But, the threat remains.
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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
ooooh this js super interesting - high cost/scarcity of DRam means consumer electronics are getting de-specced to meet demand giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...
Companies are lowering the specifications of products to get ahead of the component shortage.
Justin Hotard, chief executive of Nokia, told the FT that it was redesigning some of its products to reduce the memory component. Hotard said the chip shortage was affecting Nokia's mobile, broadband and internet-routing equipment.He described the chip crunch as the "new normal going forward for the foreseeable future" and expected shortages to last through to 2027.
Console makers will be "forced to innovate" to get to the market at a lower price, said Piers Harding-Rolls, head of games research at Ampere Analysis.
There is renewed talk of in-game advertising to subsidise hardware, as well as new types of subscription bundles, he added.
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Politics Phil @politicsphil.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
That's Brilliant !!
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Steve Walker @steve-walker.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Progress... But sure, Andy Burnham, the real threat to road safety is older drivers, not driverless cars or adrenalin-fuelled young men.
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Steve Walker @steve-walker.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
I've just been re-reading Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron's 1995 essay 'The Californian Ideology' on social origins of the internet. It remains startlingly fresh in a world being overwhelmed by (particular visions of) AI.
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Karen Gregory @karengregory.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
"The workers of Amazon Mechanical Turk have been part of the AI economy for more than two decades. They helped build the infrastructure that made today’s technology possible, often without recognition, security, or a meaningful voice in the systems they helped create."
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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 02/09/2026
The fact that *you* don't sell your family tree to a tech company won't stop all those other people from selling it on - as anyone whose foolish relations handed their genome over to 23andme can attest: www.npr.org/2025/03/24/n... 16/
npr.org
23andMe is filing for bankruptcy. Here's what it means for your genetic data
The California biotech firm said in a statement that it is hoping to find a buyer to address its ongoing financial struggles.
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History and Heritage Yorkshire @handhyorkshire.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
I never knew how it started. Founded on 4 September 1939, Citizens Advice emerged to help civilians navigate the severe upheavals of World War II. Operating from makeshift locations like air-raid shelters, advisers addressed critical wartime crises, including lost ration books, evacuation tracking
The work of the Citizens' Advice Bureau, A group of civilians sit and wait their turn in the waiting room of the Citizens' Advice Bureau Men read newspapers to pass the time, whilst the women try to entertain the young girl accompanying her mother. 1940 Public Domain.
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Steve Walker @steve-walker.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Thoughts and prayers...
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David Edgerton @davidedgerton.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Andy Burnham becomes yet another PM who calls for an 'innovation-led economy'. The delusions live on; the circuit breaker fails to work.
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Steve Walker @steve-walker.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Don't know about the methodology, but this feels right. 😊
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Ken Shirriff @righto.com · 30/08/2026
Before semiconductor RAM, most computers used magnetic core memory. This is the 32 KB core stack from the computer on Spacelab, the Space Shuttle's experimental laboratory. Let's take a closer look...
The core stack from the Spacelab computer. This is a stack of six rectangular circuit boards, joined by blue connectors on each end. The cores are visible on the top board. The 294,912 cores are way too small to see; there are eight large reddish-brown squares, each holding a region of cores. 18 reddish and greenish stripes are slightly visible, showing regions for the 18 bits of storage.
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Minnesotan Kaiju @whisperingpines.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
The twerkers shall control the means of production
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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Schools in England start returning from summer break next week, and this term many will become AI testing sites as the Department for Education plans to trial AI tutoring, scale it up sector-wide, and create new standards for classroom AI codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2026/08/27/p...
codeactsineducation.wordpress.com
Prototype testing, scaling, and standardizing AI tutors in schools
As students and teachers return to classrooms for the new academic year, the schools sector in England is set to become a testing ground for experimental AI applications this autumn. Following the …
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Steve Walker @steve-walker.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Anyone know why Microsoft decided to compromise basic file operations in Windows 11? This is looking like my last Windows machine. And no, life is too short for linux/ on office at this stage!
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Information is Beautiful @infobeautiful.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Who's Suing Whom in AI? Notable lawsuits from over 100 filed against AI companies to date 🧠
A radial bubble network diagram titled "Who's Suing Whom in AI?" mapping notable copyright infringement cases from over 100 lawsuits (David McCandless / Information is Beautiful, June 2026). Five major AI companies form the central targets — Google, Meta, and OpenAI as the largest, with Anthropic and NVIDIA as mid-sized defendants, plus a ring of smaller defendants including Midjourney, ElevenLabs, Suno & Perplexity. Arrows radiate inward from plaintiffs colour-coded by type: green for authors, orange for media, yellow for musicians, pink for platforms, teal for publishers, and red for visual artists. Notable plaintiffs include the New York Times, Universal Music Group, Getty Images, Disney, Elsevier, and Reddit — which appears on both sides of the chart. Three outcomes are marked: one win, one settlement, one loss.
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MapQuest @mapquest.com · 27/08/2026
We’re not changing it.
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Matthew Dowd @matthewjdowd.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
RIP the iconic W. E. B. Du Bois, died today 1963. “Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.” “For education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.”
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LabourStart @labourstart.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
USA: Dolly Parton Was a Proud Union Sister www.thenation.com/article/econ...
thenation.com
Dolly Parton Was a Proud Union Sister
Organized labor is celebrating the life and legacy of an artist who championed working women and carried a union card for almost 60 years.
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Steve Walker @steve-walker.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
'Slop squatting'
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 24/08/2026
"how can we harness gen AI to [insert hefty demands like support democracy, preserve fundamental rights, advance human flourishing]?" STOP, step away, read work showing fundamental limitations of genai & harm it has caused, reassess what you’re demanding from genai, rethink & adjust your expectation
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peterkwells @peterkwells.com · 21/08/2026
Did you know UK govt has published a call for evidence on charging for public sector data, w/examples like bus timetables and environment data? Well, here's a thing on how that will make a lot of things a bit worse and increase costs of providing public services peterkwells.com/2026/08/21/c...
peterkwells.com
Charging for public sector data is likely to cost us more than it raises
The UK government has published a call for evidence called “The marginal cost restriction on public sector data re-use”. It proposes making it easier for the public sector to charge people for public ...
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Steve Walker @steve-walker.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
The irony of reading about the globally integrated nature of technology production underpinning the great power of tech giants. I can't even save my notes file because Windows file management is so compromised by Onedrive Microsoft rant for the day...
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