iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 23/07/2026

Great, new tariffs, worth the same as the other new tariffs, different legal basis. More of the same to follow. This is turning into PTSD of my PhD where nothing of substance was changing but the entry into force of Lisbon meant I had 250 pages of article renumbering to deal with. 🫠

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 23/07/2026

Lifelong loather of Tess, saluting and reporting for duty. I still can't think of that book without being incensed by how much I hate *everyone* in it.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 23/07/2026

Though if we were going to send some far away from the legislature so they can do as little harm as humanly possible, these three would be low on my list of candidates, tbh.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 23/07/2026

What kind of meal? Not to be ultra middle class here but that covers three days of meal delivery boxes for four people, let alone home cooking!!! These people have no idea what actual poverty is. (I don't either, but at least I know to shut the hell up about my privilege and not demand more.)

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 23/07/2026

The whole point of increased defence spending is to build European capacity given our inability to rely on America for defence. I can't think of a worse appointment in that light.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 23/07/2026

Querying in *a* trade wonk D&D group if we're the one you're talking smack about - or if there's some *OTHER* trade wonk D&D group that actually manages to meet weekly that we have to go to war with for pride of place. CC: @explaintrade.com @georgeriddell.bsky.social @nicolesykes.bsky.social

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 22/07/2026

It's a great topic on which I have many thoughts, most of which centre on Michael Gove basically cursing the UK to become obligated to rate vox populi over expertise. Also: someone should do one for universities themselves, ironically.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 22/07/2026

Trans people breathing somewhere on British soil, obviously. Sigh.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 22/07/2026

Yo - I know over in the academy we're all employed, but if you do any consulting or get any royalties on the side, fill this in, because you are very likely to have highly variable SE income and what they are proposing will be a nightmare to manage in your case. Promise.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 22/07/2026

Way to show off that you understand nothing of human history, mate.

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tante @tante.cc · 22/07/2026

It does make sense: OpenAI was losing ground and mindshare to Anthropic. They are running out of money but couldn't IPO because SpaceX ruined it. This "our model is a Cyberweapon" is advertising directly to the Pentagon.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 22/07/2026

Yeah, but it's hard to persuade people that something is bullshit when you go in with "CLEARLY this is all lies." 😉

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 22/07/2026

We're not suddenly in Terminator Hell. We're in a situation where I would call the team setting this up either naive or sloppy, and hey ho, they can use the knowledge they gained to build in better firewalls when they next INSTRUCT THE PROGRAM TO DO SOMETHING, which is all this is.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 22/07/2026

The real news here is that the OpenAI staff working on this clearly didn't properly sandbox and airlock the AI when running it on this particular task, as far as I can tell. It did things they weren't predicting because it found holes they didn't intend to be there.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 22/07/2026

Add to this the fact that OpenAI is broke as hell and wants to go for an IPO and we're clearly in the latest stage of overselling what all AI can do. Yes, if you task it with doing bad things with code and you didn't properly airlock it, it will do bad things with code! Jesus.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 22/07/2026

The reporting on this is driving me mad. The AI was *instructed* to try to "get out" and found vulnerabilities it exploited. It's not like it woke up one morning and just decided to go hack something.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 21/07/2026

You'd think they would have learned from that cheeky "there's no money" letter that electorally haunted them for decades but no, no, we must carry on the proud tradition of being smug about having bollocked something up.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 21/07/2026

Idle thought this morning: Does Nandy actually *like* DCMS? ... How does that work?!

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 21/07/2026

I think a lot of work has been done on the discourse > salience pipeline and it's real - the thing that broke Starmer is that nothing he did cut through everyone banging on about immigration. Burnham's only chance is to work up policy + media strategy that gets that cut-through.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 21/07/2026

And - I think this adds to the "ungovernable department" vibes that it has, where whatever you put in you always get xenophobic ultra bureaucracy back, because these teams need to learn their jobs fast and guess where they're learning from? A horror case study of institutionalism.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 21/07/2026

Sure, but all reporting on him is "look how far this little gay baby has come!" and I'm just like yes when then little gay babies are basically careerist fash who say everything the ptb want to hear, they do go far, don't they!

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 21/07/2026

Like yeah it's nice that gay people can now have jobs but maybe we can celebrate that when they're not right wing shills who just happen to be gay and everyone's happy to ignore that because they're right wing shills.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 21/07/2026

People really need to stop giving this dude "credit" for being gay when most of what the stands for and believes in alienates the vast majority of the LGBTQIA++ community. This is like giving cred to Mahmood for being not white - okay cool but look at her bloody policy!!!!

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 21/07/2026

I personally just can't stand him, which is probably producing biases, but I also think he'll be worse on basically everything except maybe realistic defence spending. Didn't add welfare because we're still with McFadden, and why curb him, he's not toxic like Mahmood. Sigh.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 21/07/2026

Vibe check. Click the areas where you think Andy's Gov will be an improvement on Starmer in light of your values. 1️⃣ Immigration 2️⃣ Economic policy 3️⃣ Education 4️⃣ Arts & culture 5️⃣ Human rights 6️⃣ Defence 7️⃣ Environment 8️⃣ Other - comment pls! 📊 Show results

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Jonathan Kingham @jonkingh.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Rather despondent this morning. Each and every of Shabana Mahmood’s planned reforms will cause immense harm for no benefit, be hugely costly to implement, and cause extensive upheaval and complexity. The excellent recent letter by various Labour MPs explained this very well.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Keeping Mahmood in post is the more electorally meaningful decision, but letting Phillipson keep Equalities is the maddest one. You have already decided to make an enemy of her by taking away her main job, but then you decide to piss off everybody on the socially liberal side of Labour? Why?

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 21/07/2026

(The him here is Burnham, we all know Streeting's singular priority is the career of Streeting.)

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 21/07/2026

I guess the charitable explanation is that culture and equality are just not priorities for him, which I think takes us from "his values are actively awful" to "his values are passively awful". I hope we're all uplifted by that.

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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 20/07/2026

Back into the Cabinet after two years in a silent monastery in Tibet.

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Adam Bienkov @adambienkov.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Worrth remembering that Andy Burnham has a long record of being anti-immigration. He's kept Shabana Mahmood in place because he agrees with her

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Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 20/07/2026

well he shouldn't be

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 20/07/2026

Oh fuck me, I'd missed Streeting on Defence, which is just "why" - and one assumes Healey will just clobber him.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 20/07/2026

Very happy to be shod of BP in education, quite rate Powell, but what an absolute slap in the face to keep her on W & E. Between that and Mahmood, Burnham is exactly what I thought he would be: an appeaser through and through.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 20/07/2026

I willed this into the world didn't I. Hahaha.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 20/07/2026

You've left the receipts there, mate, it's fine, we'll just throw 'em at you. <3

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 20/07/2026

i mean it's just online but the STRESS IS REAL

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 20/07/2026

Yeah, absolutely. Like I said elsewhere, I think we can assume this means she won't be laser focused on eradicating gender affirming care because God doesn't approve of her getting boners looking at trans women or whatever (looking at you, Wes) - which is better than the alternative.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 20/07/2026

I mean, she wasn't doing anything with it so there's plenty of work for him!

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 20/07/2026

Maybe he and Nandy can share DCMS.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 20/07/2026

lol sorry idk why I sent that as a screenshot - shared it with a whatsapp group instead of linking, it's late, I'm ver ytired and stuck in a Pokemon Centre queue for the rest of my life

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 20/07/2026

Here, some minor hope - not re immigrants but at least there's something there that resembles actual left values????????? Which is not much at all but we'll sort of take it? Bar very low?

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 20/07/2026

Yeah. And we're not getting a vocal ally from any of the main parties in power at this point, so I'll at least take someone who won't laser focus in on this as an issue with a grudge. I hate that the bar is that low, but it absolutely is, so this is an 'improvement'.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 20/07/2026

Oh, I think the HO job breaks you - you might not go in thinking immigration is a real problem but you sure can't leave without thinking it is. Just saying, I remember a different version of her and hopefully time away from that post will result in some mental recovery. Sigh.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 20/07/2026

Eta - here's our answer. Confirms my gut feeling that we're facing "party policy" transphobia rather than someone who makes it their life's work to eradicate gender affirming care, which means that things are (sigh) unlikely to get *worse* under her tenure at least.

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Sylvia de Mars @sylviademars.me · 20/07/2026

IN HER DEFENSE (I will regret this almost immediately but bear with me) when she was the chair of the immigration select committee, she was *excellent* in attacking horrible government policy from a rights perspective so maybe she's not inherently like this, maybe the job broke her, ...

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