Interesting Things on the Internet: April 8th 2024 Edition

• What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?. The Tories are not qualified to run a country. The Conservative Party, whose history goes back some three hundred and fifty years, aids this theory by not having anything as vulgar as an ideology. “They’re not on a mission to do X, Y, or Z,” as a former senior adviser explained. “You win and you govern because we are better at it, right?”. Narrator: they were not.
• Rebecca Solnit: Slow Change Can Be Radical Change. We need stories in which getting where you’re going—individually or as a society—mostly happens step by step with maybe some backsliding, muddle, and stalling, not via one great leap. Reminding myself that DoES Liverpool is a long-term project, and that's okay.
• Searchable transcripts of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry hearings. At some point (hah!) there'll be enough digital literacy in Government that this sort of things won't be needed; until then, folk like Matthew Somerville will continue making important information more accessible.
• ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza. This is the risk with so-called AI. Not that the machine will become sentient and take over, but that evil people will use it as cover for committing atrocities.
• Jon Stewart on the false promises of AI. Facebook's "AI" assistant: "your toast is ready" [...] Jon Stewart: "why don't you get to work on curing the diseases and the climate change and we'll hold down the fort on toast"