Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Slow Down Arthur @admiralbooth.bsky.social · 3h

Thought you were on honeymoon? Congrats BTW

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 5h

I see Robert Jenrick is supporting Hamit Coskun who is appealing his conviction by reference to the ECHR (which Jenrick wants to withdraw from).

Who knew that the ECHR could be useful, even to the anti-ECHR Hard Right?

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Slow Down Arthur @admiralbooth.bsky.social · 3h

Interesting that nowhere does she say she’s a Labour mp.

Slow Down Arthur @admiralbooth.bsky.social · 3h

The Kiss of Death.

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UNITED24 @u24.gov.ua · 3h

3 years ago on this day, russia launched its first large-scale attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
Today, they did it again — a typical line of behavior for a serial killer, wanting to beat its victims into submission.

Like we told russia 3 years ago, read our lips: without you.👇

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Slow Down Arthur @admiralbooth.bsky.social · 4h

Wolverine’s arsehole Dad.

Sarah Dempster @dempster2000.bsky.social · 4h

If eating scotch eggs in an Austin Allegro had a face.

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Sarah Dempster @dempster2000.bsky.social · 4h

If eating scotch eggs in an Austin Allegro had a face.

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Rima I Anabtawi @rimaanabtawi.bsky.social · 6h

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the 2025 #NobelPeacePrize to Maria Corina Machado for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy

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Slow Down Arthur @admiralbooth.bsky.social · 7h

Shibboleth is a tough one, too.

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Slow Down Arthur @admiralbooth.bsky.social · 7h

Calling Yewtree…

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Slow Down Arthur @admiralbooth.bsky.social · 7h

Is this American English, because it’s definitely not English.

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Sarah Elizabeth Cox @oispooky.bsky.social · 8h

My kid's Clacton nursery has cut hot lunches for toddlers to save money, and sent round leaflets to parents advising us on preparing packed lunches for around 90p per day.

They have no waiting list for places because there's so few jobs here worth doing once you've covered childcare.

Otto English @ottoenglish.bsky.social · 1d

Twelve Jobs Nigel has earned over £1 million in additional income since the general election.

To understand the scale of it, since the July 2024 election he's earned roughly £100k more as a brand ambassador for Direct Bullion than Starmer gets as PM.

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news...

Nigel Farage earns over £1m from 12 'second jobs' - check how much your MP earns

The Reform UK leader's most lucrative second jobs include hosting on GB News, serving as a brand ambassador for Direct Bullion and recording videos for Cameo

www.mirror.co.uk

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Slow Down Arthur @admiralbooth.bsky.social · 7h

And… CLEANSE

Thomas Hansen @thomashansen.bsky.social · 7d

The famous guitar riff for Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine" originated from a "circus melody" warm-up played by guitarist Slash during a 1986 jam session.
While Slash played the riff in a joking manner, bandmate Izzy Stradlin recognized its potential, and the band built the song around it.

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Slow Down Arthur @admiralbooth.bsky.social · 14h

Is it the free boob hypnotism?

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Stone Cold 𓅃 @bisexualmorpheus.bsky.social · 1d

Yer da’s been decorating the zafira

POV: you are stuck in London traffic behind a 2008 Vauxhall minivan adorned with various right wing slogans including “RIP LONDON KHAN AND STARMER GAVE FCUKED YOU! HONK IF YOU HATE EM!” & “Starmer stop the boats”. The license place is “RIP BE” and there are pictures of a demonic looking Keir Starmer and Sadiq Khan adorning the bumper and rear window. England and Union Jack flags fly from the rear windows

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Slow Down Arthur @admiralbooth.bsky.social · 15h

Didn’t he fund it because he felt guilty?

Slow Down Arthur @admiralbooth.bsky.social · 15h

Staithes.

Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · 1d

What’s the word where you’re from that, when pronounced exactly as it looks, identifies a tourist immediately?

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Slow Down Arthur @admiralbooth.bsky.social · 15h

Mine was ‘Dr Who and the Genesis of the Daleks’.

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 16h

Every single AI data center is a toxic investment, with most of its value tied up in GPUs that will be multiple generations behind by the time these things turn on - and then die in 3-5 years.

All to build for AI demand that doesn't exist.
edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo...

Actually, wait - how long do GPUs last, exactly? Four years for training? Three years? The A100 GPU started shipping in May 2020, and the H100 (and the Hopper GPU generation) entered full production in September 2022, meaning that we’re hurtling at speed toward the time in which we’re going to start seeing a remarkable amount of chips start wearing down, which should be a concern for companies like Microsoft, who bought 150,000 Hopper GPUs in 2023 and 485,000 of them in 2024.
Alright, let me just be blunt: the entire economy of debt around GPUs is insane.
Assuming these things don’t die within five years (their warranties generally end in three), their value absolutely will, as NVIDIA has committed to releasing a new AI chip every single year, likely with significant increases to power and power efficiency. At the end of the five year period, the Special Purpose Vehicle will be the proud owner of five-year-old chips that nobody is going to want to rent at the price that Elon Musk has been paying for the last five years. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the rental prices for H100 GPUs that went from $8-an-hour in 2023 to $2-an-hour in 2024, or the Silicon Data Indexes (aggregated realtime indexes of hourly prices) that show H100 rentals at around $2.14-an-hour and A100 rentals at a dollar-an-hour, with Vast.AI offering them at as little as $0.67 an hour.
This is, by the way, a problem that faces literally every data center being built in the world, and I feel insane talking about it. It feels like nobody is talking about how impossible and ridiculous all of this is - it’s one thing that OpenAI has promised one trillion dollars to people - it’s another that large swaths of that will be spent on hardware that will, by the end of these agreements, be half-obsolete and generating less revenue than ever.
Think about it - let’s assume we live in a fantasy land where OpenAI is somehow able to pay Oracle $300 billion over 5 years. Said money is paying for access to Blackwell…

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 16h

Tomorrow: The AI Bubble is built on impossible promises. GPUs die in 5 years, nobody has built a 1GW data center, and they have the power to do so. Stargate Abilene won't have enough power before 2028.

Here's a link for $10 off premium.

edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo...

Everybody is very casual with how they talk about Sam Altman’s theoretical promises of trillions of dollars of data center infrastructure, and I'm not sure anybody realizes how difficult even the very basics of this plan will be.
Nevertheless, everybody is happily publishing stories about how “Stargate Abilene Texas - OpenAI’s massive data center with Oracle - is open,” by which they mean two buildings, and I’m not even confident both of them are providing compute to OpenAI yet. There are six more of them that need to get built for this thing to start rocking at 1.2GW - even though it’s only 1.1GW according to my sources in Abilene.
But, hey, sorry - one minute - while we’re on that subject, did anybody visiting Abilene in the last week or so ever ask whether they’ll have enough power there?
Don’t worry, you don’t need to look - I’m sure you were just about to, and had simply been busy! - but I did the hard work for you and read up on it, and it turns out that Stargate Abilene only has 200 megawatts of power - a 200 megawatt substation that, according to my sources, has only been built within the last couple of months, with 350 Megawatt of gas turbine generators that connect to a natural gas power plant that might get built by the end of the year in the event that one of the multiple construction firms involved . Said turbine is extremely expensive, featuring volatile pricing (for context, volatility fell in Q2 2025…to 69% annualized, meaning that if you had these prices across the entirety of a year you’d see swings of 69% up or down) and even more volatile environmental consequences, and is, while permitted for it (this will download the PDF of the permit), impractical and expensive to use long-term.
Analyst James van Geelen, founder of Citrini Research recently said on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast that these are “not the really good natural gas turbines” because the really good ones would take seven years to deliver due to a natural gas turbine shortage.
But th…

$Stargate Abilene does not have sufficient power to run at even half of its supposed IT load of 1.2GW, and at its present capacity - assuming that the gas turbines function at full power - can only hope to run 370MW to 460MW of IT load. I’ve seen article after article about the gas turbines and their use of fracked gas - a disgusting and wasteful act typical of OpenAI - but nobody appears to have asked “how much power does a 1.2GW data center require?” and then chased it with “how much power does Stargate Abilene have?” The answer is not enough, and the significance of said “not enough” is remarkable. Today, I’m going to tell you, at length, how impossible the future of generative AI is. Gigawatt data centers are a ridiculous pipe dream, one that runs face-first into the walls of reality. The world’s governments and media have been far too cavalier with the term “gigawatt,” casually breezing by the fact that Altman’s plans require 17 or more nuclear reactors’ worth of power, as if building power is quick and easy and cheap and just happens. I believe that many of you think that this is an issue of permitting - of simply throwing enough money at the problem - when we are in the midst of a shortage in the electrical grade steel and transformers required to expand America (and the world’s) power grid. I realize it’s easy to get blinded by the constant drumbeat of “gargoyle-like tycoon cabal builds 1 gigawatt data center” and feel that they will simply overwhelm the problem with money, but no, I’m afraid that isn’t the case at all, and all of this is so silly, so ridiculous, so cartoonishly bad that it threatens even the seemingly-infinite wealth of Elon Musk, with xAI burning over a billion dollars a month and planning to spend tens of billions of dollars building the Colossus 2 data center, dragging two billion dollars from SpaceX in his desperate quest to burn as much money as possible for no reason. This is the age of hubris - a time in which we are going to watc…$

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Slow Down Arthur @admiralbooth.bsky.social · 16h

I love that they get so worked up about a silly, outdated little European prize. It shows how pathetically inadequate they are.

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Dan Neidle @danneidle.bsky.social · 19h

Who benefits from the abolition of stamp duty land tax?

The first answer: people buying very expensive homes. Average saving for someone buying a £10m+ home is £1.7m. Average saving for someone buying a £250k-£500k home is £5k.

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Adam Bienkov @adambienkov.bsky.social · 21h

Nigel Farage accuses teachers of "poisoning our kids" on race issues.

Here's a reminder of what teachers and fellow pupils at Farage's own school remember of his own views on that subject.

www.adambienkov.co.uk/p/nigel-fara...

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Justin Baragona @justinbaragona.bsky.social · 22h

Besides linking Tylenol in pregnant women to autism, RFK Jr. now says circumcision is part of the reason why kids are autistic.

"Children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism, and it's highly likely because they're given Tylenol. None of this is positive..."

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 1d

This pretty much captures the contradictions of the politics of Kirk and Turning Point: Of course we oppose doxxing and violence, but we will absolutely use inflammatory language, false claims, and enemies list that fuels threats and intimidation.

Several days after publishing the petition calling for Dr. Bray’s dismissal from Rutgers, the Turning Point USA chapter added an update saying that it did not support harassment or the doxxing of him or anyone else.

“I think that all death threats and doxxing are unjustified and not how political disputes should be resolved in civilized society,” Ava Kwan, a Turning Point USA chapter member, said in an email on Wednesday.
But she defended the broader point of the petition, saying, “I think Dr. Antifa, who believes in violence as a political tool, should be fired, of course. Taxpayer money should not fund the salaries of terrorists.”

For years, Turning Point USA has maintained a watch-list of hundreds of professors whom the group accuses of advancing leftist propaganda in the classroom. Dr. Bray is on the list.

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