Don Paterson on AI and literature.

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Common Tern Update! Last year 53 nesting pairs of Common Terns were observed on the Ringaskiddy Pontoons. Notably, Tern Red 744 was sighted in Gambia in October 2024, after also being spotted there in 2023. This bird was ringed as a chick in Ringaskiddy during the summer of

'Mackerel stocks near breaking point because of overfishing' Foreign fishing vessels should be banned from our waters entirely, and our own fishing industry should have all hell to pay if our fish stocks collapse like this. theguardian.com/environment/20…

Google can afford to pay fair compensation for its AI training data

Contrarian view, Deepmind and Arm should have been protected from majority non European ownership. They were enough to have created sufficient scale for European tech.

I’m struck by how profoundly non-humanistic many AI leaders sound. - Sutton sees us as transitional artifacts - x-risk/EA types reduce the human good to bare survival or aggregates of pleasure and pain - e/accs reduce us to variables in a thermodynamic equation - Alex Wang calls

There is an inherent asymmetry between maintaining the ground we stand on and improving the state of the world for the better. Everything you take for granted and stop maintaining will deteriorate and be lost. For example every new generation is born ignorant, it takes just one

The Hill of Allen is one of the most important sites in Irish mythology. And look at it This was the home of Fionn mac Cumhaill 🐟⚔️ The Irish Government should be ashamed. But they aren't. "Going for Growth" by encouraging a rapid increase in population to sustain building

Any ethical system that seeks to ‘maximize the good’ inevitably relies on reductive assumptions that compress the complexity of the world into a tractable, lower-dimensional model. When such models are extended beyond their proper scope, they can lead to atrocities committed in

can't shake the feeling that the only real way to prevent people from getting sucked into the digital slop vortex is to make the physical world more beautiful, nourishing, convivial, kind

Philosophers sometimes talk about charity as a feature of a good argument: charitably presenting the opposing argument in its best and most defensible form. Philosophers should also consider hospitality: making those with opposing views feel welcome to the discussion.

Very simple rule- if your farm has less nature than it did last year, you're not able to claim any payments that relate to nature. Why would we pay for net biodiversity loss?

Last week, two lunatic women throw paint on a Columbus painting in Spain. We saw it all over the news. What no one talked about is how Lucía Martínez, an art conservator, rushed to the Naval Museum to clean the painting. Thanks to that, she could remove the vast majority of

Marc primarily funds gambling apps, cheating apps, and bot farms. He does not want you to build things that are actually good for society.

It is not a healthy thing when senior Irish politicians spend a large part of their careers eyeing up bigger jobs overseas. Who are they really trying to impress, the voters or their future bosses?

Using Albert Dolan TD’s new transparency database, we can now see that the company responsible for building the 14 steps in Mount Merrion, Actavo (formerly known as Siteserv), has received over €85 million in payments from the State. The newly available breakdown shows that

you pity the moth confusing a lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world

A Canadian firm is applying for a licence to strip vast quantities of seaweed from the west of Irelands coastline. As an interesting aside, this is banned in Canada, the country with the world’s largest coastline, for environmental reasons.