Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog: ‘…since there are already countless places where you can’t be yourself, there is no need to build another one of those.’

How Mark Zuckerberg, Once a Trump Foe, Changed His Tune on President-Elect: There was a time when he didn’t publicly admire ‘President Trump’s divisive and incendiary rhetoric’ quite so much.

Reform UK tops landmark poll for first time: Ugh.

A Coup is In Progress in America: ‘The transformation happening before our eyes—from a government bound by law to one bound by personal loyalty—is precisely what generations of Americans gave their lives to prevent.’

A real-world test of artificial intelligence infiltration of a university examinations system: A “Turing Test” case study: The 100% AI-written psychology essays weren’t detected as such by the graders, and they typically scored higher than the human ones.

DeepSeek Fails Researchers' Safety Tests: The hot new AI bot appears to be up for discussing pretty much anything, irrespective of harm.

‘I lost 10 years of my life’: how UK betting giant’s unlawful marketing kept suicidal gambler hooked: A particularly dark example of the perils of letting companies surveil, extract and exploit the trail of data modern life requires we generate.

The UK is a World Leader in Stomping Peaceful Protest: There is, unfortunately, something we’re still good at.

Trump’s calls with British leaders reportedly left staff crying from laughter: Maybe they were crying for other reasons too.

Dear Trans Kids, You Don’t Need the Government’s Permission to Exist: ‘In every era of US history, queer folks have carved out their spaces despite criminalization, discrimination, and violence.’

‘Sputnik moment’: $1tn wiped off US stocks after Chinese firm unveils AI chatbot: Open-source chatbot DeepSeek can apparently do more AI with less resources.

Spotify Hosts Trump Inauguration Brunch and Makes $150,000 Donation to Ceremony: Sigh.

Björk Says Spotify Is “The Worst Thing That Has Happened To Musicians”: ‘The streaming culture has changed an entire society and an entire generation of artists.’

Let’s Try to Always Provide a Dignified Way Forward: “While dealing with tough student situations, always provide a way for them to come out of the situation with their dignity intact, while still achieving the goal behind the intervention” seems like great advice when interacting with non-students too.

Far-right pundit Matt Walsh rails against women in law enforcement: ‘It’s an absurdity!’: Matt Walsh is an absurdity.

Advocates ‘deeply worried’ as Trump’s justice department halts new civil rights cases: One among many other extraordinarily worrying actions from the new president.

Pope warns Davos summit that AI could worsen ‘crisis of truth’: He was the subject of one of the more famous early deepfakes to be fair.

A rotten Apple: Tim Cook’s betrayal of LGBTQ+ rights: Never love a corporation part 9999.

The Emptiness Of Zuck’s Promise To Move ‘Biased’ Trust & Safety From California To Texas: Zuckerberg’s ridiculous ‘we’ll move the remnants of our trust and safety team to Texas because that’ll make them magically less biased’ stunt is even sillier when it turns out many of them already live there.

How to survive being online: You can use the internet without being Very Online, as they say.

Trump inauguration: Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk seated in front of cabinet picks: Remember the good old days where it wasn’t the done thing for political leaders to make their chumocratic oligarchy fantasies quite so obvious.

Trump embraces role of demagogue on divine mission to reshape America: Trump kicks off with an utterly shameless, quite chilling speech.

New Year, same American violence: America is a ‘culturally violent place’, as well as having far too many guns of course.

Zuckerberg’s Spineless Surrender: Rehashing Old News To Enable False GOP Narratives: ‘Zuckerberg’s claim that he would stand up to government pressure on moderation is undermined by the fact that he’s revealing this literally while caving to government pressure on moderation.’

The Guardian view on development’s paradox: the rich benefit more than the poor: ‘Developing countries struggle to break out of a trading and financial system skewed against them because the global north’s economic growth still depends on extracting their resources and labour’