His students deserve and should demand a refund

“According to AI companies, creativity isn’t an innate human endeavor, but a problem, an inefficiency waiting for a technological intervention…Such rhetoric conveniently abstracts creativity from a complex, embodied human experience & represents it as a computational problem to be solved.”

outright lies

"The very first thing he did is launch Trump Coin and it just felt like the extractiveness has now been institutionalized" Area crypto guy is *so close* to getting it. The whole damn thing is extractive, you numbnuts www.coindesk.com/policy/2026/...

Why isn’t this video on the front page of every newspaper? The country we thought we had is lost.

This is great, and its central observations about factory-fication apply far beyond the academic context

'With it, the danger is that, under a narrative of financial constraints, universities take actions that emphasise governance practices that reshape behaviour so deeply that, over time, what remains may still be called a ‘university’, but no longer acts like one.' Astute, informed, important. 4/4

Extremely petty peeve: podcasters (usually North Americans) saying 'with that being said' to mean 'moving on from what I just said' rather than the correct meaning which is 'despite/in contrast to what I just said'

amazing how the entire machine can pivot within 24 hours. no need to slowly upsell the argument; just issue new marching orders

The ethical and legal damage will be with us forever but it’s the raging incompetence that will strike first, within the next few days.

2020s: AI "System Prompts" are lengthy, carefully constructed sets of expert rules about a particular domain, created by "prompt engineers". 1980s: AI "Expert Systems" were lengthy, carefully constructed sets of expert rules about a particular domain, created by "knowledge engineers".

The real breakthrough of the year -- something that matters far, far more than generative AI ever will.

Just AISI there, using 'post volume' and 'negative sentiment' on the r/CharacterAI subreddit as a source of evidence for the impact of emotional dependence on AI www.aisi.gov.uk/frontier-ai-...

of all places, why the hell would i want a 'year in review' from linkedin

🔴 REVEALED 🔴 The Institute of Economic Affairs – the anti-state, anti-climate pressure group that "incubated" Liz Truss – was bankrolled by oil giants and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. 📝 Exclusive findings from @desmog.com 👇

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

"The current lack of oversight departs from established norms: regulatory mechanisms that are standard in other high-impact domains remain largely absent in AI governance" New study on public attitudes to AI regulation, from the Ada Lovelace Institute: www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/policy-brief...

This is an actual captioned figure in a published article, and not a bit of marketing imagery. Absolutely unbelievable

I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture. They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1

Can we take a moment to acknowledge just how bad text-based 'asking' is as UI

❗ Researchers say they’ve found a universal “jailbreak” for top AI models, through poetry. A new study shows that rephrasing harmful prompts as short poems can bypass safety filters across all major models, raising questions over AI Act compliance. www.mlex.com/mlex/article...

when I was young, i used to wonder how people like this would fare in life, as they didn't seem suited for gainful employment. it turns out, the internet allowed them to accumulate a massive audience of similar idiots, enriching them and turning them into a presidential advisor

Cloudflare outage in the UK -- the consequences of concentrating infrastructure in ~10 companies becoming clearer by the day

Interesting how often we seem to equate cleverness with constant, manic activity. I wonder how many smart folk fly under the radar simply because they know how to chill out

"Sure, our plagiarism machine ingests enormous amounts of copyrighted material without anyone's permission, but it's the users of the machine who are the 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 criminals, your honor." 🙄🙄 Just unbelievable levels of chutzpah. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

We didn't plagiarize, you made us plagiarize by asking questions to which we stole the answers. "Because its output is generated by users of the chatbot via their prompts, OpenAI said, they were the ones who should be held legally liable for it – an argument rejected by the court."

New NY State law on "AI Companions" 👀 www.governor.ny.gov/news/governo...

Typography matters, don't let anyone tell you otherwise

Seen on Reddit

Yoshua Bengio trotting out the nonsense idea that LLMs have volition and goals #FTAISummit

banger

We talk about enshittification as a tech phenomenon, but applied to everything it basically describes neoliberalism -- constant squeezing of more juice when there's nothing left to give, coupled with a rictus grin telling us it's all fine, everything is just *great*

The salient question is why anyone would ever think a system producing output based on existing statistic distributions of fragments of text would be a reliable source of truth. That's the real enigma.

Watching Magnolia for the first time since ~2001. Some barometer of growing up.

Ezra Klein interviewing one of the extremists of the AI nonsense sphere www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/o...

No punches pulled by one of the finest screenwriters/producers still going

Undergraduate moral philosophy question: to what extent is someone's apparent goodness contingent on the alignment of their experience and choices with their expectations of what life can and should be

Folk outraged about digital ID as though the infrastructure isn't all already there and operating (national insurance, passport, tax). It's just another interface on top of all that. If there's an issue, then it already very much exists

Today's the day! My new book MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER is finally out! If you want to understand why tech billionaires are so obsessed with impossible ideas about space and AI — and why that's dangerous — this book is for you. #MoreEverythingForever www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-...

sometimes the world doesn’t need to hear your take

psa: it's 'envideya', not 'nivideya'

“I don’t remember anyone ever saying to us ‘Oh I just don't think we're properly reflecting the Green Party view, or the liberal-left view on this story’,” one former BBC journalist told me. “It was always just slanted in one direction – which was basically the nativist, authoritarian direction.”

Data, striving to represent, can never keep up

Nice touch from DuckDuckGo

Can we send the phrase "writ large" to Room 101 please

I'm not going to repost any of the insane antisemitic conspiracy bullshit that grok is spewing today, but it highlights how absolutely essentially is that we not let LLMs become a form of epistemic grounding for our society.

Good day as any to delete Facebook, Instagram, and/or Threads if you have not already The fact that Meta will not rule out using private photos on your camera roll to train AI is abominable, full stop futurism.com/meta-sketchy...

A full design for the George Street and First New Town project, has been approved by the Transport and Environment Committee. The report follows the completion of the technical designs phase and sets out the next stages of the project.

All these things happened to me in London today. I paid 3 shillings to the coachman to convey me to London - a distance of a mere 30 miles or so, e’en though twas a Saturday. /1