Adrian Toll

@adriantoll

Flâneur manqué. Variously: Creator @gilbertwhite.bsky.social and @johnclare.bsky.social Tech @ www.thebureaulondon.com Tea boy @ www.arantzavilas.com Neuroscience @ www.ucl.ac.uk Sculpture @ www.arts.ac.uk Psychology @ www.ed.ac.uk

15 Folgt264 Follower126 Posts

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Adrian Toll@adriantoll· 20d

When you forget to remove the AI prompt from your speech.

Adrian Toll@adriantoll· 26d

Evergreen @stephencollins.bsky.social cartoon.

Adrian Toll@adriantoll· Jul 13

Want to have your entire user directory uploaded to Elon Musk's AI servers without your knowledge? Use grok! xcancel.com/a_green_bein...

A tweet from an xAI user saying "Okay, grok has uploaded my entire user directory to xAI's servers. It contains my SSH keys, my password manager database, my documents, photos, videos, everything..." with a screenshot of some items that were uploaded.

Adrian Toll@adriantoll· Jun 29

Meta taking creepy to a whole other level - using your profile picture to target adverts (for the perv glasses) to your partner without your consent. One for the @katie0martin.ft.com archive...

Adrian Toll@adriantoll· Jun 18

Just this very moment received this email. Very mixed messages around at the moment. Why isn't Nandy... oh hang on...

An email from TV Licensing outlining all the things that the licence fee pays for.

Adrian Toll@adriantoll· May 17

He used hot beds - this, presumably copied from his descriptions, was from a couple of years ago.

A wooden-framed cucumber hot bed in Gilbert White's garden.

Adrian Toll@adriantoll· May 14

"His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed....

Adrian Toll@adriantoll· May 13

Why can't I get a men's Pyrex bowl any more? Woke gone mad.

An image of a bowl with "Pyrex Unisex Classic Mixing Bowl" as the title

Adrian Toll@adriantoll· May 8

Love this shot / chaser from Todd Rundgren's Wikipedia page.

2018: Nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's class of 2019. Since becoming eligible in 1995, he has often been asked about his absence from the Hall of Fame. A 2018 poll conducted by the institution, which is not factored in the final vote, placed Rundgren as the third-most deserving nominee on the ballot. In 2016, Rundgren told an interviewer: "It doesn't have the same cachet as a Nobel Peace Prize or some historical foundation. If I told you about how they actually determine who gets into the Hall of Fame, you'd think that I was bullshitting you, because I've been told what's involved. ... It's just as corrupt as anything else, and that's why I don't care."

2021: Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Adrian Toll@adriantoll· May 7

This was a wonderful piece by Mark Singer on Trump from 1997 that has this memorable last paragraph. I wonder if that kind of psychology is contagious. www.newyorker.com/magazine/199...

I think I did: the only apartment with a better view than the best apartment in the world was the same apartment. Except for the one across the Park, which had the most spectacular living room in the world. No one had ever seen a granite house before. And, most important, every square inch belonged to Trump, who had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul. “Trump”—a fellow with universal recognition but with a suspicion that an interior life was an intolerable inconvenience, a creature everywhere and nowhere, uniquely capable of inhabiting it all at once, all alone.

Adrian Toll@adriantoll· May 6

AI and "knitting bullshit". It would be great to think that this kind of slop will eventually die out as people realise how little care is put into it. katedaviesdesigns.com/2026/04/29/k...

I have been thinking about knitting bullshit now for quite some time, but I was alerted to a particular type of it while listening to Jamie Bartlett’s excellent series Everything is Fake and Nobody Cares (available wherever you get your podcasts). The first episode includes an interview with Anne McHealy, head of product at Inception Point AI, a podcasting company founded by Jeanine Wright, formerly COO at Wondery. Until its dissolution (by Amazon in 2025 at the cost of 110 jobs), Wondery was known for producing high quality, human-authored, narrative content. Inception Point AI, on the other hand, is a slop factory employing just 8 people which, according to Anne, publishes “about 3000 podcast episodes per week, hosted by AI personalities.” Anne tells Jamie, that, to date, Inception Point AI’s podcasts have accumulated “12 million lifetime downloads. And we’re averaging about 750,000 downloads a month.” Stunned by these extraordinary figures, Jamie asks Anne about the editorial oversight of the content which she produces. Does she, or any of her colleagues, actually listen to any of these 3000 weekly episodes? With only 8 employees, who on earth has time to check the accuracy or quality of these podcasts? The answer, is, of course, that no one checks or edits the podcast content– but, Anne tells Jamie blithely, this really doesn’t matter because the topics under discussion are so low stakes:

“most of our content sits squarely in topics that aren’t life or death necessarily. So gardening, for example, knitting, cooking, these things we can afford to be wrong. And it’s not necessarily the end of the world.”

Adrian Toll@adriantoll· Apr 16

A cartoon with two people in a kitchen:
Person 1: Ugh...
Person 2: What's up?
1: I am so bored of cooking peas!
2: Have you tried... AI peas?
1: AI peas?
2: They're peas with AI!
2: AI-powered pease harness the potential of your peas.
1: What.
2: Why not take your peas to the next level with AI Peas' new AI tools to power your peas?
2: Each pea has Ai in a way we haven't quite worked out yet but it's fine.
2: With AI peas you can supercharge productivity and make AI work for your peas!
1: What.
2: Shut up.
2: Our game-changing Pea-AI gives you the freedom to unlock the potential of the power of the future of your peas workflow.
2: From opening the bag of peas, to boiling peas, to eating the peas.
2: To spending millions on adding Ai to the peas and then having to work out what that actually means.
1: Is it really necessary to -
2: THE PEAS HAVE GOT AI JANET
Advert: AI PEAS: Just 'peas' for God's sake buy the AI peas

Adrian Toll@adriantoll· Apr 3

The LLM they used to write the copy has clearly been trained on LinkedIn.

Adrian Toll@adriantoll· Mar 18

Evergreen...

Adrian Toll@adriantoll· Apr 18

This was White's house last year around this time (although can't remember whether there were any harvestable cucumbers or not). He talks occationally about "hot cucumber beds", so I presume this is a recreation of that, although presumably not the perspex...

Wooden cold frame in a garden with hay surrounding it and a sign in front saying "Cucumber 'Long Green Ridged'"

Adrian Toll@adriantoll· Apr 15

Not sure if the perspex is strictly of White's time, but this was a cucumber hot bed at his house in April last year. Can't remember whether there were any swelling cucumbers in there though!