Notices by Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social), page 4

“Rose promptly deleted all their designs from Spreadshirt, closed their account, and emailed Spreadshirt to say they’ll sue if Spreadshirt ever touch their stuff with AI. Spreadshirt thanked Rose for the ‘candid feedback’.

It turns out artists despise AI. They want every AI vendor, particularly Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, fired into the sun. You think you hate AI, talk to an artist.”
https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/115057384865009313

Inception: putting out a discussion about YouTube compression artefacts and general AI weirdness *on YouTube* 😬

https://youtu.be/86nhP8tvbLY?si=tEkpdpXun-OcBa7l

Pic: La Pethick, an 89-year old retired psychotherapist, one of 466 people arrested yesterday, is removed by 4 policemen.

For holding cardboard signs saying “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”

She and her fellow activists triggered the police into arresting over 120 more than the previous largest number of arrests in a single protest, thought to be the poll tax riots in 1990.

The photo is by Toby Shepheard for the Sunday Times.

#gaza #democracy

https://archive.ph/2025.08.09-205507/https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/palestine-action-protests-march-5jgf7q6q8

…Before the protest, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan police said: “We are aware that the organisers of Saturday’s planned protest are encouraging hundreds of people to turn out with the intention of placing a strain on the police and the wider criminal justice system.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/09/defiance-grows-uk-ban-palestine-protest-group-action

Which is exactly what is needed when idiot MPs pass bad law sculpted by a reactionary Home Secretary propping up indefensible foreign policy from a Labour government full of shit

If we say 1.5° is still alive then we don’t have to look at why it’s not.

If we keep “could” in the phrase “the world could soon become uninsurable” then we don’t have to consider that we are doing everything we can to ensure that it *will*.

Gotta stop that capitalism bubble from popping, even as we inflate it.

Not this quarter.
Not this quarter.
Not this quarter.
…
Not this quarter.
Oops

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/08/climate-insurers-are-worried-the-world-could-soon-become-uninsurable-.html

Gravel road ahead
#energyTransition

Went to a bank branch today to make a payment I have to make in person due to various factors.

Was waiting to be seen and overheard a conversation between a bank employee and another customer. The employee was dumbstruck by the customer not having internet access and therefore struggling to suggest next steps.

We are storing up *so* much trouble. Building systems that are failing people

“Gaza. I feel it particularly because I am Jewish. I know how much wickedness and cruelty were meted out to Jews in my lifetime. I was born in ’41 at the height of the Holocaust.
…
And so my heart is broken and I think the terrible thing I have to face is that Hitler won. He changed us. He made us like him.”

—Miriam Margolyes

https://mas.to/@therightarticle/114921420130573426

Imagine if 40 years ago tens of the world’s most prominent (mostly white, mostly male) musicians were all criminalised for protesting the Ethiopian famine.

Imagine a law being passed only the day before BandAid so the concert going ahead anyway. But the Met Police turning up, closing all the doors to Wembley, commandeering the PA and announcing that everyone in the stadium was under arrest

@aral @nemo

If one doesn’t send it through them directly, one’s government will in any case store one’s data with TESCREALists who sell AI kill systems

https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/114822120418973333

My thanks to Sven – https://mathstodon.xyz/@SvenGeier/114819445178105464 – for reconnecting me with this which I saw a while ago but had been unable to rediscover.

I now know, courtesy of a post on @RichardJMurphy’s blog – https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/03/26/from-centre-right-to-hard-left/ – that it was a letter to The New Statesman in 2023

#ukpol

@FediThing

It’s been that way for a long time, by design: https://www.wired.com/story/the-toxic-potential-of-youtubes-feedback-loop/

@cwebber

Qatari airspace
https://mstdn.chrisalemany.ca/@chris/114733621406707994

…Took me a while to re-find this. In mid-2022, CBS Sunday Morning published an excellent 6-minute video called

‘Meet the Fossils’: Ancient life that powers our world

It was written and narrated by Robert Krulwich, and is based on the work of @aatish. The animation was directed and designed by Nate Milton, with music by Buck St. Thomas.

https://youtu.be/SNYxy2rY7fA?t=16

…Apparently, in 2018 there were about 13.4 million commercial flight hours per year: https://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2018%2012%20Month%20Documents/Aircraft%20and%20Related/Total%20Fleet/Total%20Aircraft%20Airborne%20Hours%20-%20ALL%20AIRCRAFT.htm

So that’s about 36.7k flight hours per day.

At 10k litres of kerosene per hour, that’s 367 million litres of a one-time hydrocarbon jackpot pissed into the air each day, never to be seen again.

Totally normal

…Otherwise, just a normal ~100,000 daily flights worldwide, burning > 10,000 litres of kerosene per hour each, in an era of carbon overshoot
🙄

…Here are some highlights (lowlights):

“If you drop all that old life into the container that we call Earth, and burn them, it turns out that what we burn in *1 year* weighs 100x more than everything alive today.

Everything. All the whales, elephants, forests, insects, grass, crops, birds, fish, people, dogs and cats. Add up all the carbon in everything alive now, and still, in one year we burn a hundred times more.”

Update: see the numbers in the thread below

#climateDiary

The promise of web search *was* making content and competing to get search platforms to send people your way.

The future of web search is people mistakenly thinking that’s still the game and instead competing to have search platforms steal it, remix it, and *not* send people your way.

Or at least, send them in such tiny numbers *relative to search impressions* that it will have been better to play a different game entirely

Palantir were one of the most prominent sponsors of Trump’s parade.

And “around a quarter of Palantir’s global workforce are now based in London, helping the government on policing, military contracts – and, crucially, working deep inside the NHS”.

Mandelson, the UK Ambassador in Washington has “long been a vocal supporter of Palantir”

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/health/2025/03/palantir-problem-nhs-andrew-marr

…Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is an *excellent* visitor attraction.

And it costs a fortune to maintain HMS Victory, HMS Warrior, M33, the historic buildings, and soon the Royal Marines Museum. (The Mary Rose Museum is its own separate business, I think.)

It’s a shame it feels it has to scrounge from gurning fascists