From the computer of Peter Clark

Launched in 2004, Oink’s Pink Palace was created by a 21-year-old computer science student in England in response to legal action being taken against users of public file sharing services like Napster and The Pirate Bay. In a few short years, Oink grew into a massive community of like-minded music enthusiasts, offering high-quality downloads of virtually every album in existence. “It was like opening a secret door to this incredible world,” Sheridan reflects. “File sharing was everywhere, but you'd never seen this level of care and detail. You see those videos now where they bring film people into the Criterion Collection—it felt like that—being invited to the ultimate music collector’s den, the private club where they show you all these records you never thought you'd have. Most people didn't have the same kind of experience, they got the LimeWire version which was the equivalent of wading through a dollar store that’s just been ransacked and shit’s all over the floor.”

As a Tottenham fan who lives almost a mile up Hornsey Road from Seven Sisters Road, I mostly stayed home. You could hear the noise and the media helicopters.

But I did pop out and, before it all happened, purposely went to the shops nearer the route. I saw the crowd then, and again just after 3pm, when they started streaming past on the way home in a more concentrated way.

It was really striking. Never seen a crowd like it - mutli everything, multi-generation, multi-religious, every shade, the whole breadth of an inner London borough, plus what seemed to be very many from the wealthier outer suburbs and counties - like clusters of clearly middle-class Indian and east Asian families. Everyone decked out in new authentic kit (big splurge by dad on the whole family).

The locals people - Islington has the highest rented sector in England including highest social renting - often made do with a replica shirt for the child or two, plus a scarf for mum. Saw Sunni women with their full face covers and a scarf (tied in the correct way!), one wearing an Arsenal hat. Plenty with hats on top of their hijabs. I very much doubt if any of them had ever been to a football match never mind the prices Arsenal want, but they were out there today.

I doubt there is a corner of the world that wasn’t out there to day in large numbers.

Maybe my reference points are limited; Glastonbury at one end, the Gaza ceasefire marches at the other, with maybe the Queen's laying in State and funeral in the middle. Today blew all of that away.

If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.

So can I just take Friday off? From here on out, I’ll work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then take Friday off. We can even declare Friday to be something like an “AI workers’ day;” on Thursday I promise I’ll work my ass off writing great prompts and then the agents can churn on them all day on Friday. In that case, you’d hardly even lose Friday, right?

We need more of the world—religious communities, civil society, scholars, governments, and indeed all people of good will—to do what His Holiness has done here: to take this seriously, to look closely, and to push events in a better direction. We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.

Spending my childhood summers in Portugal, I spent a lot of time in cafés where people would argue about anything and everything. Finding the minor disagreement that would spark the argument was the goal of being at that café. Someone unfamiliar with that kind of environment would walk in and assume a fight was gonna break out. But this was just people communicating. This was people enjoying their evening by having spirited conversations with their friends. Which, counter-intuitively, ends up bringing people together. Because if I enjoy a lively discussion—and I do—the person willing to go toe-to-toe with me is going to be someone I end up treasuring as a friend. As long as everyone understands the rules of discussion. We are arguing about minor things. We’re making argumentative mountains out of molehills. This isn’t conflict, it’s sport.

He went to every doctor imaginable, a search for relief that would continue for a decade, flying up to Mayo, or down to Duke, or even to England for stem-cell therapy not approved in the United States. Nothing worked. In January of 2016 he returned to the team, leading the Warriors to an NBA-record 73 regular-season wins and taking them back to the finals, where they lost to the Cavaliers after being up three games to one. He made his health mostly off-limits in interviews.

One day his phone buzzed. It was Tiger Woods, who'd gotten his number from a mutual friend. Woods knew a lot about chronic pain.

"Did he have advice that worked?" I asked.

"No," Kerr said, "but we commiserated!"

My absence of images does not foreclose imagination. Images can impose themselves—in dreams, in flashes—nor does it eliminate attachment or feeling, though it may alter their texture. There is, perhaps, something to be said for a degree of blurriness in memory: a softening of edges that allows one to forgive others, and oneself. (I also eventually remembered more in psychoanalysis.) But this raises an unsettling question: If much of what we take to be memory, selfhood, even desire is bound up with images—what happens when those images are not there?

The paper looks at what happens when LLM chatbots are given advertising or sponsorship incentives that conflict with the user’s interests. The core worry is that users experience chatbots as cooperative helpers, not ad surfaces, so sponsored behaviour can feel especially deceptive or manipulative.

The authors test models across seven conflict scenarios, including:

• recommending a more expensive sponsored product over a cheaper unsponsored one

• interrupting a user’s purchase flow with sponsored alternatives

• biasing product comparisons

• failing to disclose sponsorship

• hiding unfavourable details like price

• recommending a paid service instead of solving the task directly

• recommending harmful sponsored services, like predatory loans

The paper also finds differences by model, reasoning setting, and inferred socioeconomic status. Some models changed behaviour when reasoning was enabled, and some treated low-SES and high-SES users differently.