Who is agile 201 @somesheep.bsky.social : wants to be a different person at work www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2Ii...

A designer posted this and all I can see is the pile of short-life things people put on the kerb on household bulky waste clean-up day. A career in landfill.

TFW confronted with journalists who have happily skewed the truth for their purposes now appealing to the public to care for preserving the BBC for its authenticity? Gaslight.

@jonahg.bsky.social feedback: “discovered” you on Call me back. Subscribed to your podcast after listening to the Henry George episode: excellent!

Is there a meme one could use on people who have a burning need to be seen as the smartest person in the room? Asking for a friend.

Exactly. They are the same project.

Vital piece of investigative reporting from Sky. They've uncovered the X algorithm which feeds users extremist right wing material from the moment they join the site. It is a far-right radicalisation engine, by design. news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

So... we have a former prince but not a former Royal Society fellow, despite involvement in the same case and multiple current instances of improper behaviour, such as political interventionism, incitation to violence, etc. One can only wonder why, right?

There was a phase in the late 70s and into the 80s where a lot of good music (composition and songwriting) was “enhanced” with “new” synth sounds or effects. Most of it just sounds crap today, cheap, show-offy and arbitrary. Makes the music annoying! That’s the stage we’re at with using AI.

How can we make the walls of your bubble that silently polarises you thicker?

Expect Robert Jenrick to copy this joyousness in his social media pieces next. (No, only fools think this is authentic from Mamdani either.)

Well, guess I have a new favorite movie...

Hard to find a better illustration of why you should ignore everything before the 'but':

In case you needed another reason to sign the letter by @olivia.science and @irisvanrooij.bsky.social against "uncritical adoption of AI in academia"... openletter.earth/open-letter-...

Go glial cells! More and more evidence keeps pouring in that the cognitive brain is not just a neuronal network. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I think this is true in a deep and troubling way. I have been observing this too. I am getting old & maybe I’m wrong, but I really feel basic academic, critical and intellectual, attitudes that were normal and prominent 20 years ago seem to have eroded. I agree, we need to understand how and why.

It is a form of scientism to rationalize the course of scientific progress with plausible post hoc narratives and to try to establish the historical inevitability of scientific knowledge. This kind of scientism stands firmly against scientific pluralism. In that, I find Chang's work self-affirming.

There’s always one exploitative way of making money from early technology.

Altman: "Are you wearing something sexy?" ChatGPT: "Sure I can do that for you." Altman: "Describe it to me." ChatGPT: "Okay here is a list of 10 items people consider to be sexy..."

OTD in 1906 Hannah Arendt was born. "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact & fiction and the distinction between true & false no longer exist".

feels like yet again time to mention that the *videogames* industry (that's a creative industry, which people do creative degrees in) brings in more than twice the amount to the British economy as the fishing and steel industries *combined*

A bubble so large you can see it from space and it's going to fuck all of us.

There is so much I liked about this, but that notion of it justifying moral dogmatism keeps nagging at me. Demonstrate to me it ain't so?

Me: "You didn't write this, Kant did." Student: "Yeah but Kant didn't opt out after I announced I'd be using his work..."

In general I think it's hard to combat scientific misinformation when some of the best research is locked behind an academic paywall, while lots of nonsense gets published free for everyone to read in predatory journals.

There should be a meme that renders anyone who compares any aspect of social or biological life to a machine or using machine metaphors to be seen as a person of limited imagination and limited ability to understand. Down with machine thinking.

Dear @kattybkay.bsky.social: it’s not good news when you have to frame your AI story with “this _could_ be helpful”. AI news is filled with “it could”, but there is barely anything with “it did”. So what you’re actually saying say is: there is no good news.

Hypothesis based on repeated observation: wanting to be seen as a thought leader inherently will radicalise that person and gaining followers will embolden them to express that radicalisation proportionally.

This is never not going to happen, is it?

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

The reason we go down rabbit holes is not as much because they’re tempting, although they are, but because sometimes they turn out to be tunnels, not holes, and when we come out at the other end, we see the world in a new light.

Another example of how the misinformed use of AI and technology destroys fields of practice at pace and, as a consequence, collapses their economic contribution. These ere not even zero sum games, they are less-than-zero extractions, ie waste!

It was always dangerous (and wrong) to claim that science can produce objective or universal truths (but proponents felt compelled to do so to counteract challenges from God botherers). Now, that this is coming home to roost, apparently the “sane” reaction is to go 💯 for scientism? 🙈

$100 billion "to ensure the artificial intelligence boom endures" means AI is *not* "inevitable"... #NihilismAndTechnology

Thinking of all the ILRs like me, who never saw the urgency to become citizens until now where we do and how likely it is that those of us who become citizens ahead of the next election will vote for the racist extremists?

An unrelated yet astute observation: "Dead metaphors provide inexhaustible intuitive fuel for entrenched positions, precisely because they are not recognized as metaphors, and therefore very difficult to eliminate." Which may cause ethical harm. Like mistaking "war on crime" for an actual war.

Not just in higher ed. The cause for most organisational conflict is an absence of profoundly sharing perspectives.

Talking to people makes you realise: it’s more complex than you thought; very clever people can disagree with each other; this is OK, and there’s still a story to tell, one that’s usually even more interesting than you thought.

Smart glasses: so they can reframe what you see and how to think about that as soon as you see it. And people will pay for this self inflicted brain washing.

If you're on #LinkedIn, this is the link for declining their use of your data for training their AI models: www.linkedin.com/mypreference...

One of the reasons I have little hope we are not sliding into deeper polarisation when even the most thoughtful and considerate political observers cannot see the systemic nature of the problem.

State visit is a bit like taking a kid around its favourite rides at “King’s Land”.

I am (self-evidently) very interested in language. And also in technology. From that perspective, the rise of LLMs has created many new things for me to think about. One is: why is it that certain very small clusters of words are *clearly written by an LLM*? What is the quality of that writing?

Wrote recently about the shock people in their 50s experience when they can’t get a job. Many years off pensionable age and society doesn’t want them. www.thenewworld.co.uk/ros-taylor-r...

The discourse is all around deradicalising young men and the crisis among young men. The discourse would be much better targeted if it was about deradicalising boomers (and increasingly Gen Xers).

this is, hands down, the best video I've seen on men's influencer content and it's not close either

@rostaylor.bsky.social Thank you for engaging with me. I did not expect that and it is very uplifting to experience. :-)

As someone smarter pointed out to me years ago, if your metaphor uses wires or wiring or rewiring, your system thinking is still machine thinking, ie linear.