Paul Harland
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pabloredux.bsky.social
Paul Harland
@pabloredux.bsky.social
Evolution: it's nothing personal. (Sorry if I ask too many questions... Share nicely!)

I'm here because you're here.

http://pabloredux.wordpress.com/

(Profile photo: a faint shadow of me cast across a weathered lichen-marked stone wall by the sea.)
Reposted by Paul Harland
New 🚨 in Technology in Society: "Personalizing AI Art Boosts Credit, Not Beauty" - led by Maryam Khan www.researchgate.net/publication/...
January 5, 2026 at 5:11 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
👇🎯 Once again, I ask, in good faith & without trying to be overly alarmist, what anyone has seen in the last year to make them believe that the 2026/28 elections will be free, fair, & democratic by any traditional meaning of the words?

bsky.app/profile/mcop...
Trump sees dollar signs with Venezuelan oil, has designs on other countries, and clearly sees himself as some kind of emperor of the world. I don’t think he has plans to leave in 2028. And he’s showing he’ll use the military however he wants
January 5, 2026 at 4:34 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
🚨🚨EMERGENCY EPISODE🚨🚨
Very few people can claim to have met and known 🇻🇪's Maduro, Chavez & interim president Delcy Rodriguez. Well, my guest @catheriner.bsky.social, former 🇬🇧 ambassador in Caracas, is one of them and she spoke to me earlier today.
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/b...
January 4, 2026 at 11:04 PM
Everybody has some double standards. But being able to operationalise it like this does allow swifter changes of direction than opponents with (slightly) more values. You need a very united opposition to the mass of bad moves to stop it - a difficult temporary coalition against a moving target.
amazing how the entire machine can pivot within 24 hours. no need to slowly upsell the argument; just issue new marching orders
January 5, 2026 at 9:48 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
I'm trying to get a sense of how many (other) people were invited and then disinvited from US campuses last year. If you have a story to share, please dm. I will keep it confidential – just trying to figure out the scale of this.
January 2, 2026 at 3:48 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
"The challenge is enormous & [moral]: to unite without vengeance, but w/o impunity.... Bc freedom doesn't come with a new president: it comes when the state ceases to be a threat."

This is re: Venezuela but also true for us & not just rn.

For how many of us is the state an active threat every day?
Best thing I’ve read this morning, from a human rights lawyer in Mexico. Translation is in the ALT-text.
January 4, 2026 at 7:10 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
Analysis of the confined crowds at the San Fermín festival in Spain shows that dense crowds can self-organize into macroscopic chiral oscillators, coordinating the orbital motion of hundreds of people without external guidance, according to a paper in Nature last February. go.nature.com/3WKkb8r 🧪
January 4, 2026 at 5:39 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
Cheshire Archives staff cataloguing 40,000 glass negatives & 35mm slides which document all aspects of life in the county over the past century for 2 new purpose built archive centres in Crewe & Hoole to open next year. 👇
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Thousands of slides catalogued for Cheshire's new archive centres
Two new archive centres are set to open next year in Cheshire - one in Hoole and one in Crewe.
www.bbc.co.uk
January 3, 2026 at 7:44 AM
"Consider the Consequences! (published 1930) is a romantic novel in the form of an interactive novel or gamebook by the American writing partnership of Doris Webster (1885–1967) and Mary Alden Hopkins (1876–1960). It is the earliest known gamebook, and has 43 different endings." Now online!
January 4, 2026 at 7:19 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
Excellent report by @lindseyhilsum.bsky.social on Colombian border: Venezuelans wait with some trepidation, acting president without any real power, fears of factionalism and descent into (possibly bloody) chaos. Concern in much of region, particularly Cuba. Scepticism everywhere #c4news
January 4, 2026 at 6:35 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
Left-wing leaders across Latin America are feeling a bit like Mexico normally feels: 'So far from God and so near the United States.' @lindseyhilsum.bsky.social on #c4news
January 4, 2026 at 6:31 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
--Think Différant--
Since mainstream analytic philosophy is clearly struggling to wrap its head around the writing of #LLM #AI, a better approach might be to consult the one philosopher who took WRITING seriously as a philosophical problem: Jacques Derrida. doi.org/10.1007/s001...
January 4, 2026 at 4:04 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
Collecting a bundle of sunsets all at once, to bustle January out of the way all the sooner.
January 4, 2026 at 4:10 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
If you've missed this piece about the different modes of empiricism in computer science versus the social sciences, I can highly recommend it. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-empiri...
The Empiricism Gap in Computer Science
So far, I have argued that there is a dissonance between, on the one hand, CS’s founding myths, curricula, and self-image, and, on the other hand, the modern production of knowledge in computer scienc...
doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz
January 4, 2026 at 1:28 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
“The neuron teaches us something uncomfortable: computation isn't a lens revealing neural truth—it's a filter that shows us only the biology that looks like a computer. Everything else gets discarded before we even begin our analysis.”

Fascinating read.
January 4, 2026 at 12:09 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
It is underdiscussed how far Reform is an attempt to find a narrow governing coalition of a group of voters - a majority of whose views are the opposite of a public majority on many/most major public policy issues. Underestimated because of media ecosystem overestimating support for these positions
January 4, 2026 at 11:39 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
From the other bank…
January 4, 2026 at 9:39 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
“Two questions leap out. The first is whether Trump’s appetite for military adventurism will continue to spread… The second question is how Trump plans to govern Venezuela… Even if Trump thinks he can run the place by remote control, reality will intervene” www.ft.com/content/4388...
Trump now owns Venezuela
The US president has a growing appetite for military adventure
www.ft.com
January 4, 2026 at 9:38 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
✨ There's lots to look forward to in 2026. Why not come along to one of our #London #Lectures? 🏛️🎤

🎟️ Book tickets for these and other #philosophy events at buff.ly/8xNGjEm
January 4, 2026 at 9:45 AM
But markets are good?
This report in Nature on the costs of competing for & administering scientific grants is shocking: "In other words, European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained." www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪
Point of no returns: researchers are crossing a threshold in the fight for funding
With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins.
www.nature.com
January 3, 2026 at 3:15 PM
After 15 years, am still sorting out my social media policy! How's yours looking?
Not the biggest news, but I did my annual update of my social media policy joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2024/10/guid... Note in particular – @joinmastodon.org.web.brid.gy 's edit policy allows you to EDIT a toot if you learn something from its replies, & anyone who's interacted with it gets notified!
Guidance to my social media communications
artificial and natural intelligence, including politics, policy, ethics and security
joanna-bryson.blogspot.com
January 3, 2026 at 3:06 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
Perhaps now people will stop wishcasting about the US military refusing illegal orders. That's not a thing that happens. The 100% compliance rate with using civilian boats for target practice was a bit of a tell.
January 3, 2026 at 1:39 PM