Simon Hewitt
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hewsim.bsky.social
Simon Hewitt
@hewsim.bsky.social
610 followers 410 following 1.8K posts
Coffee drinker, adequate guitar player and occasional songwriter. Interested in literature, SF and Fantasy, and all sorts of music. Former morris dancer and jug-band member.
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Reposted by Simon Hewitt
faineg.bsky.social
it is absolutely the tech companies fault that people now assume they’re doing something evil and sneaky even when they actually aren’t (regarding the latest Google kerfuffle)

like, no kidding that people have zero willingness to cut big tech the benefit of the doubt anymore
November 23, 2025 at 8:33 AM
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lbflyawayhome.bsky.social
“Across this cloud-dappled sky skeins of wild geese are flying”
(What to Look for in Autumn, 1960)
Writer: EL Grant Watson
Artist: CF Tunnicliffe
November 23, 2025 at 8:47 AM
Reposted by Simon Hewitt
emily.space
PLEASE this.

And also to scientists writing press releases, too - calling something "AI" when it was actually your student spending 12 months fitting and validating a model is disingenuous
mcnees.bsky.social Robert “The Baste God” McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 18h
Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪
November 23, 2025 at 9:12 AM
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hookland.bsky.social
Winter conducts its slow seduction. It has disrobed the trees, its cold kisses make them shiver. Revelation of their wooden bones offers us a new, intimate language. They speak of swelling dark and coming ice. They speak their lover's secret names. – #EmilyCBanting, 1981 #Winter
November 22, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Reposted by Simon Hewitt
ernie.tedium.co
If you have been sharing that Malwarebytes article on the Gmail thing, you should note the giant correction up top.

www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...
Update November 22. We’ve updated this article after realising we contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding around a recent change in the wording and placement of Gmail’s smart features. The settings themselves aren’t new, but the way Google recently rewrote and surfaced them led a lot of people (including us) to believe Gmail content might be used to train Google’s AI models, and that users were being opted in automatically. After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Gmail does scan email content to power its own “smart features,” such as spam filtering, categorisation, and writing suggestions. But this is part of how Gmail normally works and isn’t the same as training Google’s generative AI models. Google also maintains that these feature settings are opt-in rather than opt-out, although users’ experiences seem to vary depending on when and how the new wording appeared. It’s easy to see where the confusion came from. Google’s updated language around “smart features” is vague, and the term “smart” often implies AI—especially at a time when Gemini is being integrated into other parts of Google’s products. When the new wording started appearing for some users without much explanation, many assumed it signalled a broader shift. We’ve revised this article to reflect what we can confirm from Google’s documentation, as it’s always been our aim to give readers accurate, helpful guidance.
November 22, 2025 at 9:44 PM
Reposted by Simon Hewitt
hookland.bsky.social
Above the high tide mark the shore was a confusion of rope scraps, nets beyond mending and broken boats. To go omen hunting in this zone could only produce prophecies of woe. The augury walker had to go beyond this and search the sand for wave-gifted signs. – #DAKilroy
November 22, 2025 at 12:55 PM
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lbflyawayhome.bsky.social
On this day 22nd November 1859 Cecil Sharp, founder of the English folk-song revival was born. (Here he’s pictured overhearing a gardener singing)
Artist: Martin Aitchison
The gardener is pictured with a seedling box, singing his heart out in the greenhouse while Sharp approaches from the garden path
November 22, 2025 at 8:05 AM
Reposted by Simon Hewitt
hookland.bsky.social
Goodnight from the abandoned Rocket Test Centre at RAF Nook, where police have yet again been called about a group of teens indulging in Scooby-Dooing trespass. Goodnight from Samantha Rendell, gripping her cave wolf snow globe as talisman against the dark. Goodnight from Hookland.
November 21, 2025 at 10:02 PM
hewsim.bsky.social
#NowPlaying Pearls Before Swine - The Use Of Ashes, including the better song called "Rocket Man".
A purple album cover for the 1970 album "The Use Of Ashes" by Pearls Before Swine. Inset is an image from the 15th century French or Flemish tapestry, "The Hunt of the Unicorn VI - the unicorn is brought to the castle". It shows a number of red clad hunterss surroundng a unicorn.
November 21, 2025 at 11:20 AM
Reposted by Simon Hewitt
eastlondongroup.bsky.social
This is a great favourite of mine, "Smithfield Spires" by Harold Steggles from 1931 His view must have been taken Holborn Viaduct & I particularly like the way that he's incorporated his signature in to the signage on the building! #HaroldSteggles #EastLondonGroup
November 21, 2025 at 9:46 AM
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hookland.bsky.social
#CLNolan gives a warning about the beasts that live in the ether.
There places where our footsteps become blood in the water. They call out not to sharks, but to things no less predatory. Beasts of the ether with teeth as old as any thing that ever swam or stalked. Beasts whose attention should never be sought. – #CLNolan, 1905 This text floats in a pale blue across a negative image of trees and hill land.
November 20, 2025 at 1:12 PM
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hookland.bsky.social
There are lonely churches to be found where old saints live in strange stone boxes. When we say saints, that word has to encompass those spirits of place which were there long before the cross came along. Relics of both Christian and folk faith may be the same bone. – Dr. M. Benn
November 20, 2025 at 9:57 AM
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darrenhayman.bsky.social
New night painting.

‘I think I can find my way’

197 bus

darrenhaymanart.com/collections/...
November 20, 2025 at 8:21 AM
Reposted by Simon Hewitt
cheryllynneaton.bsky.social
I'm sure many people have mentioned this, but I think it needs to be mentioned again: women do not have yearbooks. Children do. Because yearbooks contain photos of high school students. Or younger.
josephcox.bsky.social Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 3d
This is a nuts story. An AI chatbot and image platform left millions of images exposed. They show what people are actually using the AI for: taking random women's yearbook, graduation, and social media photos and making super realistic hardcore porn with them
www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...
Massive Leak Shows Erotic Chatbot Users Turned Women’s Yearbook Pictures Into AI Porn
Chatbot roleplay and image generator platform SecretDesires.ai left cloud storage containers of nearly two million of images and videos exposed, including photos and full names of women from social me...
www.404media.co
November 19, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by Simon Hewitt
eastlondongroup.bsky.social
This is "N E Bethnal Green" by George Board from 1928. George was born on this day in 1898 & he was the only member of the East London Group who exhibited at the first Bethnal Green Men's Evening Institute show in 1924. #GeorgeBoard #EastLondonGroup #botd
November 19, 2025 at 9:15 AM
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dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social
Almost certainly the best photo I will ever take from an Iron Age Hill fort of the sun setting over an estuary as summer segues majestically into autumn.
The sun setting over the Severn Estuary as seen from the top of Uley Bury hill fort. I took this photo in September, 2021, on the most perfect windless evening, feeling euphoric having finished the edits on my debut novel, Villager. The whole walk felt like I'd temporarily stepped inside a Kit Williams painting, which was apt since for the last several decades he has lived not far from here, and the landscape was a prime inspiration for his masterpiece Masquerade.
November 19, 2025 at 9:46 AM
Reposted by Simon Hewitt
blogexhibitions.bsky.social
The perfect antidote to gloomy winter days? The light-filled paintings of Anna Ancher @dulwichgallery.bsky.social! Read about the show on our blog: art-exhibitions.blogspot.com/2025/11/let-.... This is Sunlight in the Blue Room, 1891, Skagens Museum.
November 18, 2025 at 11:39 AM
Reposted by Simon Hewitt
dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social
www.tom-cox.com
If you are a tech bro billionaire, you can delete the receding hairline your ancestry has saddled you with and replace it with a tight-knit block of follicular robo-growth, you can change your face, change public opinion en masse via the misinformation you spread via your digital platform and the more moderate and considered voices you are able to algorithmically drown out, send rockets to space, buy yourself a position at the forefront of political life despite being singularly unqualified for such a position. You can, because of all this, probably convince yourself there is in fact *nothing* you cannot do. But here you will be incorrect. What you can't do is ever be a reflective, compassionate human being who can grasp, with any feeling, the harm of your actions. The bubble of unreality you have constructed around yourself - the one which no longer contains anyone who tells you the truth- will be too well-insulated for that to be possible. You would probably believe you are enhancing your legacy with each additional chunk of power you purchase if you hadn't already dismissed the concept of "legacy" due to your conviction that, for yourself (although not for the minions) you can invent everlasting life. But, despite what you have convinced yourself, one day you will, just like everyone else, die. In the final moments, you will be reduced to something frail and helpless. You billions will not grant you an exemption from that. Maybe right then, in that reduced state, the last thing you will see is the true horror of what you were: the rippling evil of all the choices you could have made with your money and didn't, and the repercussions for the planet. Then it will be over. Those voices who said, "Fucking love that dude, he really tells it like it is - I wanna be rich like hime one day!" will fade. All that will remain will be the more rational and sane voice of history above your grave, announcing "Here lies the most heinous piece of shit imaginable."
November 16, 2025 at 8:08 AM
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lbflyawayhome.bsky.social
Shell Guide, 1955:
“Between the mild days, November frosts strip the coloured leaves of the shrubs and climbers of the hedgerow so that all the fruits of early winter show more vigourously against a paler sky”
Artists: Edith & Rowland Hilder
Writer: Geoffrey Grigson
November 18, 2025 at 9:12 AM
Reposted by Simon Hewitt
clpolk.com
every author in the class action, please file the claim.
arstechnica.com Ars Technica @arstechnica.com · Aug 27
AI advocates have warned that if every author in the class action filed a claim, it would "financially ruin" the entire industry.
Authors celebrate “historic” settlement coming soon in Anthropic class action
Advocates fear such settlements will “financially ruin” the AI industry.
arstechnica.com
November 18, 2025 at 8:41 AM
Reposted by Simon Hewitt
hookland.bsky.social
Goodnight from the Dabfoot Distillery, where the new nightwatchman is getting his ghost orientation so he knows not to disturb spectres if they’re rotating barrels. Goodnight from Cathryn Oxby, inadvertently painting pylon prophecies in her sketchbook. Goodnight from Hookland.
November 17, 2025 at 10:23 PM
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lbflyawayhome.bsky.social
“The beech is one of our largest and most beautiful forest trees”
(Trees, 1963)
Artist: SR Badmin
View of a beech wood looking up at the lovely autumnal orange foliage . In the foreground, we see the fruit and a close-up of the leaves
November 17, 2025 at 7:34 PM
Reposted by Simon Hewitt
jetwelder.bsky.social
Trk 322 of 365: a piano-based track from 2016 about facing defeat in the battle against decay and entropy. A wistful, sad song. Written with my old pal Chris Hatfield, who passed away in 2014. Free streaming & download.
#musicsky #🎧 #musicchallenge #musiciansky
jetwelder.bandcamp.com/track/the-wa...
The War Against Rust, by Jetwelder
from the album The War Against Rust
jetwelder.bandcamp.com
November 17, 2025 at 6:35 PM
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umadlp.bsky.social
Leaning Tower of Pisa: Steps by Dmitry Shakin.
November 17, 2025 at 1:05 PM
Reposted by Simon Hewitt
hookland.bsky.social
There is no ghosting hour. Every segment of the clock holds phantoms and every segment may leak them. Sunlight is no charm against them, nor does twilight guarantee their loosing. The shades of a place may walk beside us at any time. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
November 17, 2025 at 3:33 PM