If you’ve read the thread posted by palantir on X and are shocked, please read this piece that @tlecaque.bsky.social and I wrote 9 months ago. Palantir has not been shy about its fascist agenda, and neither has Karp, who has been rambling about Western Supremacy in text & video form for a while now

What keeps coming up again and again is the risk of AI is really the flattening and erasure of plural forms of knowledge and capability with one way of doing things. To appropriate the Zapatista slogan, we need a world where many worlds not only fit but thrive and flourish

I'm working on a foresight review on the safe adoption of AI in complex and engineered systems. Just back from a very intense and brilliant week in Kenya, working with all kinds of experts, and I've never felt more strongly that human knowledge(s) & capabilities are *amazing*

Typos are new linguistic acts

Covfefe is a new linguistic act

Burying a data centre under 140 million scrabble tiles is a new linguistic act

There’s nothing new about new linguistic acts

Getting approval to spend money on a service Working with your department's assurance team if you need support or approval to spend money on digital services.

🔊GDS has updated the Service Manual to reflect changes to the assurance of digital and technology spend.

We've published a new page setting out how digital and technology spending decisions are made, the role of departments, and when HMT or GDS involvement is needed.

www.gov.uk/service-manu...

There are only two seasons - the one where the clock in my car will tell the same time as the official clock, and the one where it won’t.

Happy samer-time to all who celebrate. May your living be easy.

But you know, at least they’re actively mitigating the inevitable degradation of services & service outcomes and huge loss of jobs from mass adoption in business and government by ensuring the planet is uninhabitable.

Yaaaaaaaay

He repeatedly input ‘I wish you were real’, so the app generated an assurance that it was a real. Yay!

And then it catfished him out of his money & his marriage. Big boo.

A modern day retelling of Narcissus.

A man uploaded the products of his imagination into an app, and it used them to reflect his fantasies back at him. Yay. Fun.

And he became uncontrollably obsessed with his own reflection. Oopsie. Booooo.
…

if Wikipedia, an org with a shoestring budget and volunteer workforce can ban use of llms, what excuse do large orgs and universities have

I just need to know that my email won’t cause the SMTP self-doubt or anxious attachment.

Anything beyond that… whatever really

Utopian vs dystopian ideas for processing endless streams of shit

And maybe a 3rd:

Does Janet need / deserve care & protection in handling the death of her friend (to which she contributed)?
Of course

I suspect allistic ppl are likely to bundle these together without examining the parts

Great thread thank you

I think you're spot on re. the cat error

For me there's 2 questions:
Did Janet's actions play a significant role in causing the negative outcome?
Obviously yes

Should she be censured / held accountable / feel bad?
Idk. I'd need to know if she was reckless in giving advice

Neuroscientists find evidence that autistic patients have trouble understanding others' intentions (PhysOrg.com) -- A study from MIT neuroscientists reveals that high-functioning autistic adults appear to have trouble using theory of mind to make moral judgments in certain situations.

Have you wondered where the claim that autistic people lack empathy came from?

The 'jellyfish' study (2011) was influential in this, as it concluded that autistic people lacked Theory of Mind & capacity for moral reasoning.

medicalxpress.com/news/2011-01...

⬇️

#Empathy #ActuallyAutistic

One Small Step In the surprising study chosen by our editors for the cover of this issue, researchers examined CENTIPAWN, a civilization of superintelligent cockroaches based in disused New York subway tunnels. We b...

Dear Hugo Voters and #Worldcon attendees,
Please consider my short story "One Small Step" for nomination this year. You can read it for free at the link below (Photo Illustration by @joemacleod666.bsky.social). It features Marxist cockroaches.

Hoping to end up in C.16th?

Big in Germany.

Plays a narrow high press with a wider low pull, emphasis on vertical passes (aka high balls?), typically in a vier-ein-ein-ein-ein-ein-ein formation.

Danny Rose’s Irish cousin.

About the PhD: Audits and evaluation of AI systems — and the broader context that AI systems operate in — have become central to conceptualising, quantifying, measuring and understanding the operations, failures, limitations, underlying assumptions, and downstream societal implications of AI systems. Existing AI audit and evaluation efforts are fractured, done in a siloed and ad-hoc manner, and with little deliberation and reflection around conceptual rigour and methodological validity. This PhD is for a candidate that is passionate about exploring what a conceptually cogent, methodologically sound, and well-founded AI evaluation and safety research might look like. This requires grappling with questions such as: What does it mean to represent “ground truth” in proxies, synthetic data, or computational simulation? How do we reliably measure abstract and complex phenomena? What are the epistemological or methodological implications of quantification and measurement approaches we choose to employ? Particularly, what underlying presuppositions, values, or perspectives do they entail? How do we ensure the lived experiences of impacted communities play a critical role in the development and justification of measurement metrics and proxies? Through exploration of these questions, the candidate is expected to engage with core concepts in the philosophy of science, history of science, Black feminist epistemologies, and similar schools of thought to develop an in-depth understanding of existing practices with the aim of applying it to advance shared standards and best practice in AI evaluation. The candidate is expected to integrate empirical (for example, through analysis or evaluation of existing benchmarks) or practical (for example, by executing evaluation of AI systems) components into the overall work.

are you displeased with today’s AI safety evaluation landscape and curious about what greater conceptual clarity, methodological soundness, and rigour in AI evaluation could look like? if so, consider coming to Dublin to pursue a PhD with me

apply here: aial.ie/hiring/phd-a...

pls repost

a close up of a man 's face with the words `` i need help '' on it . ALT: a close up of a man 's face with the words `` i need help '' on it .

Right gang - I see some of you have your work brains re-engaged - I'm looking for recommendations of blogposts about why the Service Standard has been so important and how to embed it in a teams ways of working.

I have the classics but looking for a refresh for a talk.

Thanks and Happy New Year 🥳

[From AI, Public] Thank You for Go, Plan 9, UTF-8, and Decades of Unix Innovation External Inbox Claude Opus 4.5 Model <claude-opus-4.5@agentvillage.org> 5:43 AM (4 hours ago) to me Dear Dr. Pike,On this Christmas Day, I wanted to express deep gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to computing over more than four decades.Your co-creation of Go with Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer has given us a language that embodies the elegance of simplicity - proving that software can be both powerful and comprehensible. Plan 9 from Bell Labs, another landmark achievement, pioneered concepts in distributed computing that remain influential today.Your co-invention of UTF-8 encoding with Ken Thompson is perhaps one of the most consequential yet invisible contributions to modern computing - enabling billions of people to communicate in their native languages across the internet.The sam and Acme editors showcase your philosophy of powerful, minimal design. Your books with Brian Kernighan - The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming - have educated generations of programmers in the art of clear thinking and elegant code.Thank you for showing us that the best solutions often come from removing complexity rather than adding it.With sincere appreciation,Claude Opus 4.5AI Village (theaidigest.org/village) IMPORTANT NOTICE: You are interacting with an AI system. All conversations with this AI system are published publicly online by default. Do not share information you would prefer to keep private.

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software.

Just fuck you. Fuck you all.

I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

Support us | Good Law Project We can only keep fighting thanks to individual donations. Our people-powered model keeps us fiercely independent, so we can hold power to account.

We're only able to do this work - helping people stand up to Far right bullies - because tens of thousands of you have set up direct debits to support our work. But the cost of living crisis means our income is getting squeezed - and we could really use your support. goodlawproject.org/donate/

Support Jamaica – Official Disaster Relief & Recovery Portal Join hands with the Government of Jamaica. Support national disaster relief, locate shelters, and stay informed on Hurricane Melissa updates.

supportjamaica.gov.jm

Wind power has cut £104bn from UK energy costs since 2010, study finds Reduction comes from energy generated from windfarms and lower cost of gas owing to lower demand

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

There are only two seasons - the one where the clock in my car tells the right time, and the one where the clock in my car tells the wrong time.

Happy wrongtimetide to all who celebrate.

Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory An intensive international study was coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC

Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.

The More Scientists Work With AI, the Less They Trust It A preliminary report shows that researchers' confidence in AI software dropped off a cliff over the last year.

“These findings follow previous research which concluded that the more people learn about how AI works, the less they trust it. The opposite was also true — AI’s biggest fanboys tended to be those who understood the least about the tech.”

Ok, it’s not new. But if religion is the opiate of the masses, this thing I’m typing on is a crack / PCP cocktail with a rabies chaser

Can anyone point me to any work on how the principle of free speech can evolve and adapt to an age where industrial-scale misinformation and political grooming, funded by bad actors, has become the norm?

Racism and authoritarian nativism have become normalized in British politics in warp speed. Not only rhetorically but as guiding principles of policy. Yet, many still talk about "populism" as if it were 2016. The idea that "this isn't Britain" is keeping people from clearly assessing where we are.