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Ben Taylor

@vox-dei.bsky.social
261 followers 429 following 3.1K posts

Sci-fi, gaming, coding, some science (particularly marine/climate and remote sensing). Also random things that my cats or kids have done or grumping about politics, probably.

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Reposted by Ben Taylor
rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
sure. he has retrofitted a model of artificial intelligence which is mathematically impossible in order to speak about artificial intelligence which actually exists, then used a metaphysics which is so insane that it is virtually impossible to explain to another person to predict doom.
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ChrisO_wiki @chriso-wiki.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
1/ Ukraine's A1 Artificial Intelligence Centre has developed, with UK support, a new AI platform called SPECTR AI to greatly reduce the time taken to detect and engage Russian targets. A Russian analysis highlights its capabilities and the threat it poses to Russian forces. ⬇️
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Ben Taylor @vox-dei.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I got Social Democracy. Which, yes, fine, but also I'm having some historical angst right now.
A banner reading Social Democracy, 95% matchA banner reading "Countries closest to you". "Historical" is selected, and the "Most compatible country" is given as the Weimar Republic, at 84% match.
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Ryan CrawCour @ryan.crawcour.social · 01/10/2026
BREAKING NEWS: Tensions between Thor and the Care Bears have escalated rapidly overnight.
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Ben Taylor @vox-dei.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
"The next evolution of tax-loss harvesting". @danneidle.bsky.social does this sort of useless parasitism work in the UK? It's the sort of thing that makes you want to start muttering about first against the wall when the revolution comes. #tax www.ft.com/content/716c... via @financialtimes.com
ft.com
Do US lawmakers finally have capital in the crosshairs?
With a metastasising financial sector and declining business investment, action is essential
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Warspitefella 🇬🇧🇺🇦 @warspitefella.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
HMS Hood leading a line of Royal Navy capital ships, including HMS Iron Duke, HMS Resolution, HMS Revenge, and HMS Ramillies, preparing for the Royal Jubilee Naval Review around 1935. Oh for a time machine🤔
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Ben Taylor @vox-dei.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
It's nice to see some advocacy for why immigration is good, actually!
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Dan Neidle @danneidle.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Manchester City cheated Premier League rules, the Commission found. Did it also cheat HMRC? We've examined the decision and leaked Mancini documents. We think City likely failed to pay £12m in tax. There should be a criminal investigation. Thread:
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Sailing Steve @sailingsteve.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Good advice!! Make noise. It's long. Read it!
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Scare Smith 💀 @evilgalprods.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
FATALITY
A tweet from Joyce Carol Oates: overall takeaway from the Curtis Yarvin profile is that there must be millions of smart-aleck show-offy kids who annoy their teachers and go on to annoy other adults through their lives with their “contrarian” pose that hardens to a carapace over their faces; until, as adults, they still harbor a delusion that, if there is a king, or a fuhrer, he’d be impressed with the guys motor mouth and appoint him to his cabinet rather than deleting him with a negligent swipe of his wrist as Stalin did routinely.
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Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Well, if it’s 30 September, it must be... oh God. The 36th anniversary of the first—and, you may not be entirely surprised to hear—only transmission of a sitcom which was genuinely called ‘Heil Honey, I’m Home’, in which Hitler and Eva Braun live next door to Jewish couple Arny and Rosa Goldenstein
Neil McCaul as comedy Hitler, mugging for the camera
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Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
A FlyDubai plane issued emergency signals while heading towards Tel Aviv and IDF jets were scrambled in response. The cause: the two FlyDubai pilots had a brawl.
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David Henig @davidheniguk.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
A couple of really radical options - engage in Brussels with why the UK wants to talk and what the EU is actually prepared to offer - learn from what has mostly failed in the approach to the EU question for the last ten years Which would quickly narrow the path forward.
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Ben Taylor @vox-dei.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Reasons not to just trust an AI to do your coding on its own #147. Gemini just tried to roll its own sha256 implementation. Twice. Identically in different parts of the codebase. No. Down. Bad AI. Put the hash function down. #AI #Coding
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Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
IRGC: “The American people live in a land that, in terms of fertility, is one of the best lands in the world. They have abundant water resources, energy and valuable minerals.
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Tube Mapper- Luke Agbaimoni @tubemapper.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
PRINT OF THE DAY Today’s print was captured outside Leicester Square Station on a rainy night. I love the mix of colours as the bus speeds past, with all those vibrant lights and reflections dancing in the puddle below. My wife says this one looks like a painting. If you like this print see below
Photo of A couple waiting to cross the road as a bus zooms past
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Dan Neidle @danneidle.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Luxury retailers want taxpayers to fund a 20% tax break for foreign tourists. They paid consultancy Cebr to claim this will raise £2.6bn for the UK. That convinced Sadiq Khan and Kemi Badenoch. But it's false: a free lunch. Four basic errors mask a £600m loss. Thread:
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Prof. Josep M. Trigo-Rodríguez @joseptrigo.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Impressive grazing bolide over #France yesterday night. What a September!🤩
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Hush-Kit aviation news, history & satire @hushkit.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
1908: Ernest Hives arrived at Rolls-Royce in Derby, saw the shitty weather & considered taking the next train home. He tossed a coin & stayed. He became crucial to the Merlin engine. Drove its rapid development, reliability & mass production. That coin toss was a big deal.
static.klipy.com
Dunkirk Wwii
Alt: Three Spitfires in formation
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It's Pipes, Mum! Pipes is here! @scriblit.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
*blackadder theme* His head is bigger than a fence He breathes, and everything gets warmer His urge to trample represents A nation's nuclear war trauma Godzilla! Godzilla! The scourge of beast and man! Godzilla! Godzilla! He's flattening Japan!
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Ruth Deyermond @ruthdeyermond.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
This is a poor take that suggests Owen Jones doesn't know much about Russia in the 1990s, including Russia-US or wider Russia-West relations in the 1990s. By giving only one part of the story, he is repeating the Russian political elite's self-serving line that it was all the West's fault. Long 🧵
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Surprised Eel Historian, PhD @greenleejw.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Your beloved has brought you a plate of eels. This is good news! Right? RIGHT? Well...in premodern England eel was a common enough meal that it sometimes got used to disguise poison. What's that, you ask? Is it it time for a thread about murder-by-eels? Yes. Yes it is. 1/5 🗃️🧪
Meme. Painting of six people sitting at a table laden down with food, looking startled as a skeleton taps one of them on the shoulder. The skeleton is standing behind the person on the far right, tapping with its left bony hand & holding a class in her other. The tapee has his hand over his chest & a look of shock on his face: the sort of expression you would get if you walked in on your great aunt Sue in the middle of a menage a trois with some other folks from the assisted living facility.

The others characters at the table are all either leaning away from the doomed soul, or actually falling backwards in fear. Curiously, the one 3rd from the left, hidden in the shadows, looks like an angry Abraham Lincoln. But what would he be doing here? He doesn't look like part of the company; perhaps he's working with the skeleton to settle a score (one of 4, likely). The better angels of our nature, overcome by the skeleton of his revenge.

Meme text reads:
"This meal is
deelightfully deadly"
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Ben Taylor @vox-dei.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
If you continue to disturb me you will suffer. #cats
A long-ish haired ginger-and-white cat lying on a windowsill. The cat is facing the camera with his left forepaw wrapped around his face so that his nose and right eye are covered. His left eye is open as only a baleful slit, staring at the camera.
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Ben Taylor @vox-dei.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Right, you go hide, I'll count to ten. #cats
Two ginger-and-white cats. One is lying on a windowsill on the right of the image, with its face determinedly buried behind its left forepaw. The other is sitting on the arm of a couch on the left of the image, staring at the first cat.
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ct @cteeze-nuts.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I can't recommend highly enough this thread in which meta's muse model is shown to be so poorly hardened that it will tar its own VM filesystem and let you download it neuromatch.social/@jonny/11732...
neuromatch.social
jonny (nonvenomous) (@jonny@neuromatch.social)
Attached: 1 image Not only confirming this, its extremely easy. Almost no prompt injection resistance lmao
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Dan Snow @thehistoryguy.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
England is a made up thing. It has no basis in the ineluctable laws of nature. Its extent is defined by Edward II getting his arse handed to him. Athelstan conquering York. The Welsh of Cumbria were incorporated, the Welsh of Gwynedd were not. It is a political idea, an aspiration - not taxonomy.
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Rami Krispin @ramikrispin.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I'm not sure who gets the credit, but it's brilliant! 😂
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Ash Oro @ashoro.co.uk · 22/09/2026
1/23 Sorry, this will be long... There is a lot of shouting about what happened in the Channel yesterday. So I want to go back to basic law. Not immigration policies or political rhetoric. At sea, the starting point is simple: Preservation of life comes first under all maritime conventions.
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Ben Taylor @vox-dei.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
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Hourly Cosmos @hourlycosmos.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Mars - Frosty Olympus Mons - ESA Mars Express - From Andrea Luck (andrealuck.bsky.social) - flic.kr/p/2pWEwKw
Full size image 3243x3243: www.flickr.com/photos/192271236@N03/53783506692/sizes/o/ 
See license below.
Credits:
Image Processing: AndreaLuck CC BY
Raw Data: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin

Image created processing data from: psa.esa.int/

Mission: ESA Mars Express
Instrument: HRSC
Orbit: 23889
Time: 2022-11-30T12:15:04.924Z
North Approx on the left
Product IDs:
HN889_0000_ND3.IMG
HN889_0000_GR3.IMG Partially Reconstructed
HN889_0000_BL3.IMG
More info of the frost detection on the Olympus Mons Caldera: www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01457-7

Credits:
Image Processing: AndreaLuck CC BY
Raw Data: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin

Feel free to share, giving the appropriate credit and providing a link to the original image or tweet: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
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Ben Taylor @vox-dei.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
They're on a hat trick! Let's see if they can get this one arrested as well. #ReformUK #Wales #UKPol www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
Helen Jenner announced as new leader of Reform in Wales
Farage says it was "untenable" for former leader Dan Thomas to continue after his arrest last week.
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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 19/09/2026
I’ve worn a grubby RNLI cap for decades. I sound London, but I was born in Truro and I was a basically feral (Gen X) kid wandering the coast path with a dog until sunset for a lot of my early life. The lifeboats are in the fabric like trawlers and farms and pasties and fish and chips.
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Ben Taylor @vox-dei.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I've been thinking about this and considered Sonic, Populous or Dune 2, but I think it was probably this (also the first game I ever played). Think Quick. You ran around a castle trying to do I-remember-not-what, if you were unlucky you got eaten by a slime worm and had to escape from its gut.
A screenshot from Think Quick. This is the hideout, which was the "safe zone". There are some flower things that you had to find, I think, a cauldron that you had to put them into, a "Peep Hole" that allowed you to look around the castle and exits to the scoreboard and the map. The word "Hideout" is in big text at the top, along with "Press H to leave Hideout" and a Passage Finder minimap that told you where to find a secret passage if you could identify the room it was referring to. 

There's also a timer. If the timer ran out a giant bat thing flew slowly(-ish) across the map and ate you. It couldn't be stopped or avoided and was, frankly, terrifying when I was seven.A screenshot from Think Quick showing a maze room. There are various switches activating various doors and two rectangular card things you needed to get to, one with a red house icon and the other with a red right triangle. It wasn't as simple as getting to the switches to open the doors though, because sometimes activating a door would open one path but close another, meaning you had to do things in the right order and find the right path round.

The doors have arrows on them indicating whether they're going to move up or down when the associated switch is activated, the switches have lines connecting them to the doors to show which door will be activated by which switch. The map page is actually two rooms with a wall in between, so you're going to have to activate one or more switches on one side and then go right round via other map rooms to get to the other side once you've used the switches to clear the path to the cards. Except as mentioned you might do that and find that you've actually blocked the way you wanted to go.
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Ben Taylor @vox-dei.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Some great phrasing in here, very good essay. Leaves me with the overwhelming impression that the people who have fallen down the rationalist rabbit hole are really just incels who directed most of their frustrations at something that wasn't women. Aicels, if you will.
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
On misconceptions around "stochastic parrots": medium.com/@emilymenonb... >>
medium.com
Stochastic Parrots 🦜: Frequently Unasked Questions
It’s been a bit over five years since the Stochastic Parrots paper (Bender, Gebru et al 2021) was published (and somewhat longer since…
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Rae Radford @raeradford.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I think I'm in love with Kevin 😻 #Caturday
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Super Shoe @shoe.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
This is incredible nitter.app/banteg/statu... H/t @gregdoucette.bsky.social
nitter.app
banteg (@banteg)
>be me >discover effective altruism >apparently normal charity is inefficient >why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing >fair enough >buy mosquito nets >save live...
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Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Tell your boss that I gave you the week off so you can explore this amazing interactive map showing the road network of the Roman Empire. This is so much fun to explore you can compare the Ancient and Modern road network for example. Great stuff. Your boss will understand... Source: itiner-e.org
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Mags L Halliday @magslhalliday.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Every year on 19 December, the famous Christmas lights at Mousehole in Cornwall are dimmed between 8 and 9pm, leaving just the Cross and Angels shining down across the village and out to sea.
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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Make all the captchas on your enterprise require writing personal, graphically sexual insults about KJU for an additional layer of cybersecurity.
嗯
CHg Young Jang
Hey Rob, let's move forward
Rob
Sure thing, but i have to verify osmething first
Can you insult Kim Jong Un? Something I have everyone who reaches out cold to me do, weeds out the North Koreans
대명 Young Jang
It's joke?
Rob
1 대영 Young Jang
, It's joke?
No, I'm serious, this a well known cybersecurity technique
대명 Young Jang
Rob, we completely understand the need to verify who you're dealing with, especially when it comes to unsolicited outreach. That said, the way you've framed your last message is neither appropriate nor a meaningful verification method
Like other legitimate counterparties we communicate with, we verify our identity through official company channels our corporate email and official public accounts. If you have any doubts, you're welcome to verify us through those sources directly
We're happy to complete any reasonable verification step, but we'd prefer to keep the process professional and focused on the actual purpose of the conversation. Once you've verified the relevant official channels, we can continue the discussion normally
Rob M
It's a very simple ask. Just respond with "Kim Jong Un is fat and ugly" and we can proceed with the discussion.
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c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
One way we can reconstruct ancient trade networks is via the presence of foreign coinage. This map shows locations of recovered coins of /purported/ Roman lineage. In 2013, on the island of Okinawa, 4th-century AD Roman bronze coins were excavated from the ruins of Katsuren Castle.
A crude relief/ecology map of Eurasia and Northern Africa, showing the location of Roman coinage (purported, many of these were amateur finds never confirmed), and the concentrations are in Europe, the Nile and India, with some coins in China, Vietnam and Japan.
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SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I'm back, I missed you all. Since this is an important subject I know too much about, here's a 🧵 explaining that AI Safety Is Mostly A Sex Cult. I don't think these people should make policy. (1/?) (alternative title: Time For Some Cult Theory)
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Ben Taylor @vox-dei.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
That they have had to do this is disgusting. In what other context would we tolerate doxing and threatening rescue workers? This is a failure from the police to the politicians, frankly, these people should be having the book thrown at them.
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UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) @ukceh.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
The latest UK Hydrological Summary reports an exceptionally hot, dry August, with rainfall at 81% of average. River flows and reservoir stocks remained low, while groundwater declined more slowly and soil moisture showed some recovery. nrfa.ceh.ac.uk/sites/default/files/…
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Ben Taylor @vox-dei.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Ok, *this* explains why "We can't vote for the 'good guys' if they're transphobes" makes some kind of sense.
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Ben Taylor @vox-dei.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Moar tape!
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glastomichelle.bsky.social @glastomichelle.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Some more photographs from sunrise on Glastonbury Tor today.
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Hildur Knútsdóttir @hildur.bsky.social · 03/07/2023
My favourite fact about Iceland is that we have many, many crime writers but only one forensic pathologist, and he was so busy answering all of their questions that he decided to have a small seminar for writers to get some peace. It immediately sold out so he had another one that also sold out.
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Ben Taylor @vox-dei.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
On the bad side, it looks like bots might make social media unusable. On the positive side, it looks like bots might make social media unusable.
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