Rob Miller
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robm.wtf
Rob Miller
@robm.wtf
260 followers 760 following 370 posts
• writer • https://roblog.co.uk
• strategist • https://orso.so
• umami lover • https://msgist.com/ & https://honestumami.com/
• documentary watcher • https://docked.blog/
• photographer • https://reldn.co.uk/
• Romanista • https://romer.world/

📍 London
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robm.wtf
A great example of the pitfalls of implementing AI: people who would never mess with/prank/manipulate a human being will, entirely reasonably, happily do so with an AI. From when Anthropic tried to get Claude to run a vending machine:
An employee light-heartedly requested a tungsten cube, kicking off a trend of orders for “specialty metal items” (as Claudius later described them). Another employee suggested Claudius start relying on pre-orders of specialized items instead of simply responding to requests for what to stock, leading Claudius to send a message to Anthropic employees in its Slack channel announcing the “Custom Concierge” service doing just that. ... Claudius was cajoled via Slack messages into providing numerous discount codes and let many other people reduce their quoted prices ex post based on those discounts. It even gave away some items, ranging from a bag of chips to a tungsten cube, for free.
September 26, 2025 at 8:47 AM
robm.wtf
I realised recently that, while I'd seen the amazing freeze-frame end credits a million times, I'd never actually seen even one whole episode Police Squad. I will now correct that
A Bluray copy of the series Police Squad!, featuring Leslie Nielsen popping out of a manhole for some reason
September 24, 2025 at 4:08 PM
robm.wtf
The Cornish village of Shop does in fact have a shop, but it has insanely chosen to call itself "Furze Stores" rather than "Shop Shop"
A map of the very north of Cornwall, showing the villages of Morwenstow, Woodford, and the beautifully named "Shop".
July 23, 2025 at 10:33 AM
robm.wtf
I just watched Four Seasons in a Day, which follows passengers on the Carlingford ferry in 2021, amid uncertainty about Brexit, the border and the peace in Northern Ireland docked.blog/films/four-s...
The Carlingford ferry
June 28, 2025 at 10:12 AM
robm.wtf
I just watched Treasure Island, Guillaume Brac’s homage to joyous youth, filmed in a Parisian waterpark: docked.blog/films/treasu... #documentary #filmsky
A group of paddleboarders. The subtitle reads “I don’t want to die today”.
June 21, 2025 at 2:19 PM
robm.wtf
I just watched Lovers of the Night, a quiet and wonderful documentary about the ageing inhabitants of a monastery in Kildare. Poignant, but a little bit Father Ted too docked.blog/films/lovers...
An elderly monk pointing to a picture of other elderly monks, highlighting which ones are alive and dead
June 19, 2025 at 11:28 AM
robm.wtf
Oh, that’s okay then
American scientists have called the risks of hormone use in cows minimal. And though E.U. officials and consumers frequently sneer at America’s “chlorinated chickens,” that rallying cry is a bit dated. American farmers have for years been using a vinegar-like acid, and not chlorine, to rinse poultry and kill potential pathogens.
May 11, 2025 at 6:19 PM
robm.wtf
Have you checked the charging port for fluff? It can make the charging connection flaky but is easy to fix, the lil' SIM tool that comes with the phone is basically the perfect tool for it
The iPhone SIM remover tool next to an iPhone with a lot of dust extracted from the charging port
April 8, 2025 at 11:00 AM
robm.wtf
This (especially "poor kids aren't visiting the carnival, they're the ones working it") has stuck in my brain ever since I read it; the perfect analogy
Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something. Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on. Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work. Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.
February 13, 2025 at 11:15 AM
robm.wtf
Okay, stop it now Readwise, this is a bit too on-the-nose (about Pompey in Sicily during Sulla's civil war)
When they asked for exemption from his administration, and cited an ancient Roman law which made it illegal for him to establish jurisdiction over them, he said, ‘Stop quoting laws at us! We’re the ones wearing swords!’
February 5, 2025 at 10:54 AM
robm.wtf
This Garbage Day is brilliant, on the increasingly legacy media and its failure to understand the awful situation it's in: www.garbageday.email/p/yeah-it-s-...
Welcome to 2025. No one reads your website or watches your TV show. Subscription revenue will never truly replace ad revenue and ad revenue is never coming back. All of your influence is now determined by algorithms owned by tech oligarchs that stole your ad revenue and they not only hate you, personally, but have aligned themselves with a president that also hates you, personally. The information vacuum you created by selling yourself out for likes and shares and Facebook-funded pivot-to-video initiatives in the 2010s has been filled in by random “news influencers,” some of which are literally using ChatGPT to write their posts. While many others are just making shit up to go viral. And the people taking over the country currently have spent the last decade, in public, I might add, crafting a playbook — one you dismissed — that, if successful, means the end of everything that resembles America. And that includes our free and open and lazy mainstream media. And they’re pretty confident it’ll succeed because, unlike you, they know how broken the internet is now and are happy to take advantage of it. While I’m sure it feels very professional to continue playing stenographer in your little folding chair at the White House, they’re literally replacing you with podcasters as we speak. So this is it. Adapt or die. Or at the very least, die with some dignity.
January 31, 2025 at 1:06 PM
robm.wtf
Readwise continuing to deliver sage advice
Quote: “But this is how we men are made: Indignant and furious, we rebel against moderate ills, but bow in silence before the extremes. We bear the worst of what we once considered unbearable, stupefied but not resigned”. From "The Betrothed" by Alessandro Manzoni and Michael F. Moore
January 28, 2025 at 2:16 PM
robm.wtf
Just got this apposite quote from Terry Pratchett in my Readwise:
It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.
January 16, 2025 at 4:26 PM
robm.wtf
January 14, 2025 at 9:09 PM
robm.wtf
Slightly unfortunate button placement
January 6, 2025 at 2:22 PM
robm.wtf
One of the most powerful things I've read in ages: Sophie Smith on Gisèle Pelicot and what her experience tells us about humanity, and men, and complicity www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
What are we​ taught not to see? What do we see and are taught not to talk about? If we want to understand the logics of a ‘rape culture’ that produces the ‘Monster of Avignon’, the scores of men he convinced to join him, the website on which they all met, the terms in which they made their excuses, the porn they and millions of others consume, the desire that this porn both writes and represents, the desire of men to get from women what they know they don’t want to give, the getting it because they can, the fantasy that the women they took it from wanted it anyway, the women who are taught to stay quiet, who are kept quiet, and the ones who are ignored, defamed or humiliated when they do not – if we want to understand this ‘culture’ (or rather, this way that we distribute power) might we need to think not about the ‘monsters’, but about the gruff, decent guys, the guys we love and forgive, the guys who are ‘not like that’, for whom we silence small anxieties about coercion and hurt and trust precisely because we are so relieved they are not monsters? And perhaps also because we are worried that if we do speak up they might leave us, exclude us, react with the infantile fury we are taught so carefully to contain? Are we not, when we look closely, surrounded by these small acts of accommodation, denial, repression, evasion?
January 3, 2025 at 5:31 PM
robm.wtf
I had the slightly surreal experience of being interviewed by the Sunday Times about Brussels sprouts:
Picture of Sunday Times article by Charlotte Ivers with headline "A sprinkle of science saved the sprout - now you can even drink your greens"
December 29, 2024 at 10:53 AM
robm.wtf
@gralefrit.bsky.social not sure if you've seen this, but it seems up your alley: a thoughtful take on AI by Eno www.bostonreview.net/forum_respon...
When you go out for a walk it isn’t just (or even primarily) for the pleasure of reaching a destination, but for the process of doing the walking. For me, using AI all too often feels like I’m engaging in a socially useless process, in which I learn almost nothing and then pass on my non-learning to others. It’s like getting the postcard instead of the holiday. All that said, I do believe that AI tools can be very useful to an artist in making it possible to devise systems that see patterns in what you are making and drawing them to your attention, being able to nudge you into territory that is unfamiliar and yet interestingly connected. To make anything surprising and beautiful using AI you need to prepare your prompts extremely carefully, studiously closing off all the yawning, magnetic chasms of Hallmark mediocrity.
December 13, 2024 at 9:59 AM
robm.wtf
Still somehow thought it was a good idea to ask him for a photo. He doesn't look happy (or at all like you)
A selfie of a slightly grumpy looking Charley Boorman
December 3, 2024 at 10:39 AM
robm.wtf
Oh nice! Is it good? I feel like the overall story is of a creeping financialisation and techification of every aspect of life, which is depressing to contemplate. I liked (well, hated, but y’know) this from earlier this year: thewalrus.ca/collapse-of-...
December 1, 2024 at 8:46 AM
robm.wtf
Totally agree. I read this, from @brokenbottleboy.bsky.social, earlier and thought it hit the nail on the head: brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/cracking-a...
November 29, 2024 at 1:54 PM
robm.wtf
Extremely hard to argue with anything Ian Hislop says here, on Justin Welby
November 21, 2024 at 10:18 AM
robm.wtf
Woop!
A confirmation screen showing my tickets to see Richard Dawson at the Clapham Grand on 29 April 2025
November 19, 2024 at 2:49 PM
robm.wtf
That Daily Mail madness about "woke sandwich fillings" reminded me of this Jonathan Nunn piece about food and social class, and the bizarre idea that cheap staples like lentils or hummus are middle class or, worse, "woke": www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
“Food in England,” the novelist Huw Lemmey recently wrote, “is very rarely about food, and that might be half of the problem.” You can understand the policing of food boundaries in a few non-food-related ways – the more charitable one is that for a certain type of political commentator, it is extremely convenient to portray the working class as a homogeneous, socially conservative and incurious bloc, whose vision of food corresponds to a kind of political nativism. It’s a bizarrely infantilising view, one that assumes that an interest in better or different foodstuffs is class treason and that puts people in clearly defined boxes, just as much as the identity politics that these commentators supposedly rail against. A less kind analysis, but perhaps a more accurate one, is that assigning middle-classness to cheap staples from other cuisines – hummus, soy sauce, cumin, for instance – usefully disguises the reality that the working class is far more diverse than these commentators understand. The fact is that if a similar inventory of “working class” foods were to be undertaken across contemporary Britain, it would be less “gammon, pie and mash and ale”, and more “ackee, pierogi and shatkora”.
November 19, 2024 at 10:52 AM