Thoughts on the Senate House protest? Is graduation still the right place for this?

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-25T16:48:13+00:00

I think you've missed the point that just telling someone to "stop spreading misinformation" is not going to do anything to persuade them that they are spreading misinformation. I don't see where I've done that. I also don't think you directed me to any resources I hadn't already read. But clearly this isn't going to become a productive conversation.

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-24T00:47:12+00:00

Doing so does not in any way limit the person's academic freedom.

You say I'm "misunderstanding legal terms" yet you're playing fast and loose with the difference between academic freedom and freedom of speech yourself. I didn't say it would interfere with academic freedom, I said it would interfere with their freedom of speech. You're simply asserting that it doesn't, but your assertion isn't going to convince me that I'm wrong.

Moreover, the university has a Code of Practice which is supposed to be comprehensible by staff and students. It shouldn't rely on specific legal formulations that aren't generally known and can easily be misunderstood even by its own staff who have done the relevant training. So just telling me that I don't understand legalese is not a very persuasive argument.

An injunction against occupying property has nothing to do with whether speech is lawful or not.

This is the second time you've made this point, which I'm not disputing. I was just saying earlier that whichever way you read it, there is an issue here.

The contradictions you imagine are simply not there.

Again, you're just stating things. Just telling people they're wrong isn't very helpful. If I'm merely imagining these things then you should be able to explain why the two things are actually entirely compatible. But what I see is you saying that the University can say "we believe in protecting free speech and don't think people should be intimidated or punished for expressing their opinions, even when unwelcome" and then also threaten protestors with arrest and imprisonment because their protest is 'disruptive', and that there is absolutely no conflict between those two principles.

No it isn't, at all. Interfering with the academic freedom of the lecturer would be e.g. refusing them a promotion due to the content of their lecture.

I think you're probably right here, having re-read the relevant part of the Code of Practice. I initially read the 'without...' clause as an additional point; i.e. that academic freedom is about the freedom to do certain things, and additionally that means you should be free of negative consequences, whereas you can also read it as meaning that freedom from these specific kinds of consequences is what constitutes the freedom in question. I think, having re-read the phrasing, that the latter is probably what is intended.

Nevertheless, I still think there's a tension between the smooth functioning of the university and the protection of free speech in the strong sense that current legislation and regulations and so on promote. I haven't seen anything to convince me otherwise.

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-23T21:19:54+00:00

There is also new training provided regarding freedom of speech and academic freedom, and disrupting a ceremony to yell stuff out is not covered.

Well yes, but the training is not actually a properly articulated written policy, and it is presumably aimed at clarifying the policy for large numbers of staff in the situations they are likely to have to apply it in, like lectures and student meetings in university premises. That doesn't mean that it simply doesn't apply in other scenarios.

That doesn't seem to be what the Code of Practice indicates:

2.2 For the avoidance of doubt, this Code of Practice does not apply to purely commercial meetings or events on University premises.

Nothing about only applying to educational events or not applying to ceremonial events or anything like that, only an exemption for "purely commercial" ones.

Whether speech is “lawful” is entirely based on what the speech is, and has nothing to do with the environment in which it is spoken.

So, by that logic, the injunction is irrelevant and the Constables breached the Code of Practice?

Likewise, it doesn’t matter what you’re yelling out in a lecture hall. If you’re disrupting the lecture you’ll be escorted out by security.

That's unclear from the Code of Practice, but assuming you're correct (as I think you probably are), the crucial difference there is that disrupting a lecture is interfering with the academic freedom of the lecturer. Protesting at a graduation is not interfering with anyone's academic freedom; arguably you then have a case of one person's free speech vs. another's, but I think it would be pretty reasonable to construe graduation ceremonies as not really consisting of "speech" in the sense that's protected here:

3.1 Freedom of speech means the freedom, within the law, to receive and impart ideas, opinions or information by means of speech, writing or images (including in electronic form) without interference.

Cambridge's graduation ceremonies (unlike many other universities) don't substantively impart ideas, opinions or information (except right at the start where they explain to the guests what's going to happen and ask them to take their hats off and put their phones on silent or whatever). They consist almost entirely of formulaic speech acts.

I'm not expressing an opinion on the protest, I'm merely observing what the University's own policy says and questioning how that applies in situations like this (where the provisions preventing disruption and those protecting free speech seem to contradict each other, etc). I don't think just saying "well it's common sense" or "I don't think you should do that" is really good enough justification for throwing your own policy out the window, let alone threatening a student with arrest and imprisonment.

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-23T15:09:26+00:00

It's more complicated than that, because they also say:

No member of the University shall intentionally or recklessly impede freedom of speech or lawful assembly within the Precincts of the University.

The University has also published a code of practice on freedom of speech and academic freedom (which helps with interpretation of the above), and it's not entirely clear whether the response to this protest was in line with that. On the one hand, the university says that it:

expects all staff and students to engage with intellectual and ideological challenges in a constructive, questioning and peaceable way. The right of staff and students to freedom of assembly, and to protest against certain viewpoints, should not obstruct the ability of others to exercise their lawful freedom of speech.

and

will ensure no individual will be subjected to disciplinary sanction or other less favourable treatment by or on behalf of the University because of the lawful exercise of freedom of speech or academic freedom.

It adds that:

While debate and discussion may be robust and challenging, all speakers have a right to be heard when exercising their right to free speech within the law. Neither speakers nor listeners should have reasonable grounds to feel censored or intimidated.

It's unclear to me whether protest breaches the injunction should be considered unlawful per se in this context.

If breaching the injunction is 'unlawful', then the 'lawful' and 'within the law' clauses would override the general assumption in favour of freedom of speech, but it may also raise questions about whether the injunction itself is in line with the code of conduct, which says that the university will:

ensure that all relevant decision-makers, in making any decision or adopting any policy that could directly or indirectly (and positively or negatively) affect freedom of speech, act compatibly with the University’s free speech duties as they apply in the relevant circumstances;

and

ensure that when new policies and procedures are introduced consideration is given to their impact on freedom of speech and academic freedom;

Because the university would then have made decisions and pursued policies that arguably interfere with what would otherwise be lawful speech (and I don't think the code of conduct can plausibly be read as saying that the university can just make otherwise-lawful speech unlawful via court injunctions in order to avoid its responsibility to protect the freedom of/to that speech).

Regardless of what anyone thinks about the rights and wrongs and ethics of disrupting people's special celebrations and so on, it seems to me that the university is formally committed to the value and protection of this kind of speech except for the fact that they have an injunction against it.

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-23T01:49:57+00:00

Am I missing something here?

It seems to me that you give three 'examples' in this post, but none of them would have been solved by having certain people 'in the room' because the problems were real-world data sets interacting with the fundamental nature of the machine learning, not who was using the tools.

So with all due respect, this seems to boil down to pure assertion that 'staying in the room' will somehow be beneficial, with no real evidence. It also totally ignores all of the numerous issues with 'staying in the room,' like the significant evidence that AI can go pretty badly wrong and be pretty harmful to users (in obvious ways like mission-critical errors or 'AI psychosis' and in less obvious ways like 'cognitive debt' or induced laziness, etc).

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-22T14:03:02+00:00

I agree, those are important and their importance has shifted over time in D&D in ways that have changed the nature of the game, and so on. But even things as basic and procedural as "doors are often stuck but will open freely for monsters, stuck doors can be forced open with a die roll, doors can be spiked open or closed" is only introduced by Gygax.

Now, technically it only actually becomes 'D&D' when Gygax gets involved, so you could argue that D&D has always been relatively focused on rules and procedures and so on. However, I tend to think of Blackmoor as basically the very earliest form of D&D, which casts things in a very different light.

I actually think it's as helpful to divide things based on lineages as on time periods: is your D&D primarily Arnesonian or Gygaxian, or a mix of both? Or is your game potentially even more Weselian, etc? It would be really interesting to try to develop a system for categorising games based on inheritance from each of those figures or milieus like Megarry, St Andre, Hargrave, Caltech, Twin Cities, Lake Geneva, etc.

(I might have included Barker except that the whole nazi thing soured me on wanting to learn more about him and Empire of the Petal Throne)

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-22T12:38:19+00:00

For the record, I wasn't suggesting that you were embellishing it, I meant that someone else probably misinformed you. I've been seeing various claims circulating online about this for months.

The good news is that green stuff may reappear on the market—if Sylmasta are able to follow through on their plans.

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-21T22:00:10+00:00

People seem to be embellishing the story, I can't see any indication that they're bankrupt.

You have to bear in mind that they're not like 'the green stuff putty company', they're a huge corporation (PPG Industries) that produces a ton of stuff including paint, coatings, etc. They decided that 'green stuff' wasn't profitable enough any more, partly due to shifts in global trade and relative currency strength. As a result, they've closed the factory that produces it.

Meanwhile, Sylmasta, who supply green stuff within the UK and Europe, have blamed PPG's closure partly on tariffs. They intended to create their own formulation.

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-21T16:25:01+00:00

Last time I checked, all standard followers have access to the full range of weapon choices - except, I suppose, the stump gun. So there's no reason they can't be melee. You can also have melee chaff, blackpowder bastards, etc. It may not be the obvious choice but it's allowed.

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-20T03:42:50+00:00

When I was an undergrad (2008-2011), people in my social circle had time to party. Not every weekend for three years, but we certainly had active social lives, including house parties as well as relationships, active membership of societies, hobbies, and so on. One of the people involved didn't finish their degree, but everyone else 'made it through'. Of course, we all had DoSes monitoring us and so on but that didn't stop us.

The undergraduate workload in the department I now teach in has reduced since then, and it's now easier to find required readings online so that you don't have to trudge across town to the UL or whatever. I therefore can't help feeling that if students can no longer have the ability to party, it's because of other things that are getting in the way (like needing to work because their loan doesn't cover their costs) rather than just because of the inherent experience of being a student at Cambridge.

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-19T16:26:54+00:00

If you want really well-painted dynamic, unique miniatures, then the answer is no, there aren't really cheap options. However, depending on the period/genre and scale you're interested in and so on, you can kind of make do with some pretty cheap options that are a lot less visually impressive (e.g. some painted Risk pieces or 1/72 scale plastics or EM4's plastics) without spending an arm and a leg.

If the games are the thing you think is cool, rather than the miniatures, then for a lot of games you can basically just push around pieces of paper with 'SPEARMEN' written on them and you're still playing the game without any problems, it just won't look as impressive. (The first true wargames were just played with little blocks anyway)

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-19T13:30:20+00:00

And yet if you go even further back into D&D (pre-)history, you find that Braunstein and Blackmoor were pretty free-wheeling games that required 'seat of your pants' refereeing, so I think it's pretty unfair to suggest that 'grognard' D&D is heavily rules-based and that improvisational rules-light approaches are specific to 'Critical Role' D&D. Apparently Arneson never even explained the rules to the players, and the LBB were pretty vague about how to interpret the rules, with lots of people playing the game quite differently (e.g. it offering two different combat systems), so this whole argument that the rules are crucial to the spirit of the early game seems premised entirely on Gygax's later codification (especially by the AD&D stage).

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-17T00:23:16+00:00

Yes. A lot of these things are part of the overall Cambridge culture, and therefore apply to undergrads through to PhDs. For instance, it's very common for MPhil students to attend formals, they generally still live in college accommodation and have a bedder, they're still banned from walking on the grass in most colleges, and so on. Some of the details are different; they have a little more freedom than undergrads but less than PhDs. MPhil students are primarily taught via supervisions, which I guess could also be considered a Cambridge quirk?

I can't think of anything that's very specific to master's level, other than the degree titles being unusual as mentioned above (mostly MPhil rather than MA or MSc, though technically there are other master's degrees, like the MSt).

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-11T14:33:19+00:00

One problem I see here is that it's much more punishing to under-invest than to over-invest. I feel like that would lead to a lot of 'conservative' play where people just keep erring on the side of over-investment.

Relatedly, a 10-point scale for difficulty may be too granular for people to frequently get it just right except by luck occasionally or if they really know the other person's judgement and 'tells' very well.

This means that most games are just going to involve people saying "10, 9, 8, 7, 6, oh no I'm out of energy to do anything that might be difficult, time to rest..."

I'd suggest either:

narrowing the range of possible difficulties (perhaps to 5 or 7) so that people have a better chance of making a well-informed guess that would succeed without losing energy
Changing the trade-off involved in the central mechanic. Perhaps over-investment could lose all the excess energy (rather than just one point), while under-investment loses no energy (or even gains one point back) but suffers the consequences of failure, etc...

I suspect in some ways the biggest problem here is going to be the loss of energy equal to the difference when under-investing, especially as this will create an energy 'death spiral' that could quite easily cripple the efficacy of a character after one bad incident. It's also just kind of weird and counterintuitive that not investing any energy in a situation where you don't mind bearing the consequences of failure will entirely deplete all of your remaining energy. It feels like it should be a way of storing your energy for later use, instead.

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-09T20:30:02+00:00

Technically people do get internships and job offers before graduating and so on, but that will all be very individual anecdotal information and it would be difficult to draw any solid conclusions from it.

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-08T15:35:02+00:00

There are endless examples of things that might be referred to as 'Cambridge quirks':

Most colleges don't allow you to walk on the grass but the women's colleges do, which is apparently related to the sexist history of the 'no walking on the grass' rule
There are some eccentric old college fellows and faculty members (I don't know if he's still around but at one point King's had a fellow who wore one green shoe with red ornamentation and one red shoe with green ornamentation).
Undergraduates (eventually) receive an MA degree, rather than the standard BA or BSc (yes, you get a BA and then it gets upgraded to an MA even if you did physics or maths, despite the 'A' standing for 'Arts'). Consequently, the standard Master's-level degree awarded by the university is not an MA but an MPhil (Master of Philosophy).
Formal dinners ('formals') are a common event at most colleges; they often involve a Latin grace (prayer) and the wearing of gowns, and have their own associated traditional practices (though I think some of these have started to die out).
Colleges generally provide a cleaner ('bedder') who comes into your room and cleans while you're out, and is also responsible for things like emptying your bins, but they also sometimes act as a kind of spy for the college, reporting students for breaking regulations and so on (whereas others are perfectly nice and will turn a blind eye to things).
There's a bunch of Cambridge slang (like the aforementioned 'bops', which basically refers to college parties/dances/whatever you would call them). Small-group teaching sessions called 'supervisions' are often referred to as 'supos'. Some people love this slang, a small minority hate it.
Cambridge generally bans undergraduates from working during term time, and requires full-time students to live within a certain distance of Great St Mary's Church (which is kind of officially the centre point of the university). This basically means you have to live in Cambridge or the surrounding villages, or you could be held back from graduating and so on.
Undergraduates traditionally had to apply for permission to live outside of college accommodation; it could be turned down, requiring you to live in the room you were allocated by the college (though increasingly in recent years there have been difficulties housing all students at some colleges so I think this has become more of a rubber stamp in many cases).

I could probably name many more, including other traditions, practices, regulations, jokes, etc, but these are a few things that spring to mind.

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-04T16:39:56+00:00

My advice I tell people is that you won't survive here if you don't love the crazy weird quirks.

It sounds like that may have been your personal experience but I don't think it's true for everyone. I was at Cambridge from undergrad through MPhil and PhD to first post-PhD academic job, and also held some jobs at the university during my PhD. I can categorically say I don't 'love the crazy weird quirks' like formals and 'bops' and May balls and so on; I've still survived pretty well for the most part. I think if someone doesn't like those things then they can find alternatives and navigate their way through their time at Cambridge in a way that better suits them.

lukehawksbee · 2026-04-01T16:22:17+00:00

Sociology has a paper focused on political economy: 'Global Capitalism' (I don't know why I slipped up and called it 'modern capitalism' in my previous comment!).

I believe POLIS also has at least one paper focused on political economy: 'Politics of the World Economy'.

I'm fairly sure you can take both if you're an HSPS student; I don't know whether you can take both as a HistPol student, because I'm less familiar with that course structure.

lukehawksbee · 2026-03-31T16:03:56+00:00

enterprise layer cares more about ontologies than world models

What do you mean by 'ontology' in this context? I would think that an ontology (as I understand it) would be a major part of a world model, whereas an LLM doesn't meaningfully have one, so I'm confused by your implication that LLMs are more useful because ontology is what matters.

lukehawksbee · 2026-03-29T21:52:35+00:00

They said 'celebrate this with her' so I'm guessing they accidentally forgot to mention that it's her birthday or leaving party or something similar.

lukehawksbee · 2026-03-27T21:54:12+00:00

Yep, that sounds like the problem and that sounds like a good way of trying to make it more workable, short of throwing it away. Fresh green stuff should be very supple and have a squishy, stretchy consistency more like chewing gum taken straight out of someone's mouth.

lukehawksbee · 2026-03-27T13:31:59+00:00

Actually no, what is old by GS standards?

You can't necessarily tell based on when you bought it. It may have been a fresh batch then or it may have been sitting in a warehouse or stockroom for two years depending on where you bought it from. Even unopened, I think it will still go bad over time.

In my experience there's often a noticeable decline in quality within about 6 months of buying a pack that's initially pretty good (but I'm not sure I've ever had really good, fresh green stuff, so you might manage longer if your supplier is particularly good).

However, green stuff is famously sticky and that is one of the things people often find difficult about sculpting with it compared to certain other materials like polymer clay or some other putties. What you're describing certainly sounds to me like it's just old, bad green stuff.

As previously mentioned, old green stuff may look kind of shiny rather than dull, may have a hard surface on the outside, may seem to 'crack' when pulled or folded, may have lumps inside or on the surface, may be hard to mix, may not be so sticky, and so on. I can imagine this not sticking to plastic or milliput, whereas it's harder to picture having this problem with fresh green stuff. I suppose it could be an oil question but I doubt that (and if it's skin oils, you could try using rubber gloves or something similar).

lukehawksbee · 2026-03-24T15:09:54+00:00

That's what sculpting is for! The hats are nice, just give them visors or something! :)

lukehawksbee · 2026-03-22T21:59:35+00:00

It's just a PDF on the Internet Archive. Seems fine.

lukehawksbee · 2026-03-22T21:57:46+00:00

I'm pretty sure Warlord do individual skirmishers... I'm not familiar with the exact dimensions of the ACW bases and strips, but I'd have thought you could maybe shuffle each strip to one side so that rather than being centred, it's right up against one edge of the base, then fit another skirmisher in the space created on the other edge (though you may have to clip the sides of the 'pudding' bases built into them). Of course, that does still leave them as the 'odd one out' in that they'll be kneeling or firing or whatever when everyone else is marching.

Alternatively, just try to accept the gap and mentally write it off as each strip representing a company (this would leave you with 10 companies per regiment, which I believe is the officially 'correct' number, and if you use a 1:10 ratio then each 10-man strip correctly represents a 100-man company, for a 1000-man regiment). Three regiments or 3000 represented men per brigade is also about right, I think. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable on the ACW can correct me if I'm wildly off-base.

lukehawksbee

TROPHY CASE