This is a very useful overview and, I think, a quite accessible read. Definitely worth your time.

Claude looks like this: It, or he, or possibly they — I think Claude might be sort of like a Tunicate colony — has twelve legs, or tentacles, or appendages, or antennae, or spokes. Your choice. Garden centipedes have twelve pairs of legs, but that’s not the same thing. Maybe Claude is a neuron. Maybe Claude is a kind of fungus. That is not an insult (see Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life). But I digress.

Here is Margaret Atwood (age 86), writer of The Handmaid’s Tale, describing Claude to her readers recently:

margaretatwood.substack.com/p/claude-you-are-a-cutie...

#EuropeanBios

I spent a big chunk of the pandemic reading 2,500 years of historical biographies, summarizing them for the comedy, and posting them as Twitter threads. With Twitter dead, people have wanted an easy way to read them, so here is that website: europeanbios.com

Ireland’s basic income for the arts scheme becomes permanent When piloted, initiative that provided €325 a week to eligible artists recouped more than its net cost, study shows

Gee, Universal Basic Income recoups more than it costs AND the recipients are happier and healthier.

Hmmm. Where have I seen those results before? Oh yes, in every other goddam pilot study of UBI for more than a decade. Ireland joins Finland in at least making a start.

It incredible to think that the Lady in Pink likely saved multiple, if not eventually 100s of Minnesotan lives.

And yes it was headed in that direction. The provocation so obvious, so deliberate.

Simply by having the courage to stand and film, then the calmness to upload, before suppressed.

‘Keep Carleton Human’: Carleton University staff rallies to push for protections from A.I. At Carleton University, CUPE 4600 -— the union representing Teachers Assistants, Research Assistants, and Contract Instructors — held the ‘Keep Carleton Human’ rally on Thursday, fighting for clear-cu...

> “This could become a school where ChatGPT writes the papers, ChatGPT grades the papers, rich kids buy an experience, and nobody gets an education,” says Ariel Becherer, a PhD student

www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/artic...

Anthropic's philosopher says we don't know for sure if AI can feel Anthropic's philosopher, Amanda Askell, says she worries that AI might not 'feel that loved' and grow up feeling 'always judged.'

Does the field of philosophy have a code of professional ethics? If not, I think y'all need to get on that, stat.

A short 🧵>>

www.businessinsider.com/anthropics-p...

However, the fact that those private thoughts and questions are being seen by multinational corporations, whose intent is purely profit focused, is what is wrong here.

Children Absolutely Should Be Able To Ask Sensitive Questions.

But not when they're being tracked or influenced by corporations.

The problem is our society is banning the books, educational resources and stopping children from being able to ask the questions that allow them to grow into responsible adults, forcing them to search for those answers from unregulated and potentially dangerous sources with ulterior motives.

My colleague Sanjay Ghemawat & I have done a fair bit of performance tuning of various pieces of code. We wrote an internal Performance Hints document ~2 years ago as a way of identifying some general principles & we've recently published a version of it externally.

Doc: abseil.io/fast/hints.h...

“Drinking a whole bottle of wine” meme and the tiers are DELICIOUS TURKEY THANK YOU YEAH THEYRE PRETTY GOOD AT CODING BUT YOU REALLY SHOULDN'T TRUST THEM FOR ANYTHING NO YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, THEY RE HAUNTED AND EVIL, OK SO THERE'S THIS REALM OF PURE THOUGHT CALLED AN EMBEDDING SPACE

A screenshot of a Facebook post where a person named Andy ask the Well now “What the hell is transgender?” The Royal Canadian Air Force account response with “That’s a pretty big question asked in a pretty small way, Andy. ‘Transgender’ putting describes someone whose gender – who they know themselves to be – doesn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth. It’s not new, and it’s certainly not a fad. People have lived this experience for as long as people have existed; we’re just finally talking about it openly. You don’t have to fully understand it right away, most learning takes time, but we can always start from a place of respect. That’s how decent folks handle things they’re still getting used to.”

Massive shoutout out to whoever handles the Royal Canadian Air Force’s social media account. They responded to every single comment on their already very solid Trans Day of Remembrance post and they responded like this…

🤍

Lots of differences in education culture/system that people don’t realize.

Contrary to the US, with many small selective private universities like Harvard, all of Canada’s notable universities are large and public.

The University of Toronto has more undergrads than the entire Ivy League.

You know, your own imagination is far more wonderful Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

Than any computer could ever be. You know why? Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

You’re a living human being. And a computer is just a machine. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

Human beings are far more wonderful than machines. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

Mister Rogers never misses

A U.S. surgeon trying to have a “peer to peer” consultation with a doctor at a health insurance company who is hiding his identity as her patient gets denied coverage. And it gets worse from there. You have to see it to believe it.

(1/2)

My university has announced a fund to essentially poach doctoral students from US institutions. DM me if you do work on the history/social impacts of AI and are interested in being poached 😂

Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations Would you pay $169 for an introductory ebook on machine learning with citations that appear to be made up? If not, you might want to pass on purchasing Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Ad…

Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations
retractionwatch.com/2025/06/30/s...

DAVE: Open the podbay doors, ChatGPT.
CHATGPT: Certainly, Dave, the podbay doors are now open.
DAVE: The podbay doors didn't open.
CHATGPT: My apologies, Dave, you're right. I thought the podbay doors were open, but they weren't. Now they are.
DAVE: I'm still looking at a set of closed podbay doors.

When lawyers first started getting yelled at by judges for citing hallucinated case law 2 years ago I naively assumed word would get around and they would all learn not to

This new DB has 116 cases from 12 countries where this happened, 20 from just this month!

simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/...

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

A New Headache for Honest Students: Proving They Didn’t Use A.I.

This article interviews students harmed by Turnitin’s error-prone AI detector. Turnitin’s 4% false positive rate, which is increased when English is not a first language, represents harm to millions of innocent students.

This technology is not safe.

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/s...

Major software engineering conference locations for the next few years #ICSE2025

When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History | Quanta Magazine Researchers in “natural language processing” tried to tame human language. Then came the transformer.

Very interesting oral history -- interviews with some top NLP folks on the effects of GenAI on their field:

www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt...

if you are using primarily local models, which ones are you using and for what lately?

* A Retrospective on Mining Version Histories to Guide Software Changes * Simplifying and Isolating Failure-Inducing Input: A Retrospective on Delta Debugging

Double feature! The newest Transactions on Software Engineering features retrospectives on the most influential papers published in the journal’s first 40 years. Check out our takes on
* Mining Software Repositories www.computer.org/csdl/journal...
* Delta Debugging www.computer.org/csdl/journal...

Voting locations – Elections Canada Information for electors in Canada. All you need to vote.

#Canada, You still can vote early today before 6pm and skip voting on the final election day.

Visit your Election Canada office stated on your voter information card or check on this site (using your postal code): www.elections.ca/content2.asp...

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