Interesting Links for 07-06-2026

[andrewducker]

1. How Scotland voted at the 2026 Holyrood election

(tags:voting elections Scotland politics polls )

2. Police in England and Wales told to halt AI use in court statements

(tags:ai police uk law )

3. Interesting piece by someone who traced their Scottish ancestry and wanted to find the real truth

(tags:Scotland history family )

4. Arithmetic Without Numbers - how LLMs produce answers to maths questions

(tags:mathematics AI text )

Comments

[greenwoodside]

3. Nice blog -- but I'm surprised people are still needing to discover that the clan tartans were a 19th century invention. I suppose the makers of kilts and such like have a strong incentive to keep the myth alive.

The romance of the Highlands is powerful and has a more or less planet like gravity by this point. Everyone in their hearts wants to be a little Alan Breck, even if they know they're really David Balfour.

The older generation of my family were very fixed on the idea of having come from Islay. I looked back through census records and found of course that, nope, the Scottish y chromosome had descended through Stirlingshire peasants and Glasgow carters.

My dad didn't want to believe me and I didn't force the point since it made him happy to think ancestors of his had come from the Hebrides.