Last weekend I gave a talk at #PyConAU. It’s about quality, scale, LLMs, science, systems thinking, hype, & what happens when the subjective nature of reality meets the assumption that the human experience can be accurately represented to or by machines. You should watch it! youtu.be/GBHGHrlRlKs

nosu, f.n: nose. (NO-zuh / ˈnɔ-zʌ) Image: Bible; France, c. 1270-1290; Bibliothèque d'Agglomération de Saint-Omer, Ms. 5, f. 246r. #OldEnglish #WOTD

Maybe the real Ship of Theseus was the Ship of Theseus we made along the way

important context for headlines like this: Altman also runs a company (Worldcoin) that he claims will solve this problem he also created

Melbourne Folks! I will be hosting a book launch to celebrate The Mechanic and the Luddite! Come hear me chat about the book with Lizzie O'Shea and Chris O'Neill — and have a free drink! • August 14th, 6pm, Victorian Trades Hall • Register for free: events.humanitix.com/sadowkski-th...

We should be putting a gargantuan amount of money into solar and storage. War economy levels. It should be free to have a guy from the government solar your house up. Electricity should basically cost nothing.

Sleep-deprived Effy has proven too much for Zoom's meeting summary AI, which has managed to produce something significantly less coherent than even my babbling. ft @attacus.net

David R. Hagen just solved a small mystery that I mentioned 13 years ago in the mouseover text of a comic drhagen.com/blog/the-mis...

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

You counter evil with real life.

Recently I found myself on Antipope Instagram, where there are endless reels of the current Antipope of the Palmarian Catholic Church. This is, of course, extremely my jam, and I started reading up on them hoping to find some wild theology, but instead I found something WAY better...

African workers labeling data and providing content moderation are the invisible backbone of AI development. They perform critical labor under challenging conditions, often for minimal pay, yet remain absent from our conversations about the AI value chain.

Someone should have called Semple an “inhueëncer” by now, surely www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Just had a sudden mental image of a melting moment shortbread cookie, but they were called “teachable moments” and filled with faux pas and the experience of sticking a fork in a toaster

I don't think that "bikeshedding" is a good name for what it represents, we should discuss alternatives

I was interviewed by @attacus.net for last night's broadcast of Byte into IT on RRR Melbourne Independent Radio. This is such a great conversation about my new book! Honestly one of my favorites so far. Huge thanks to @attacus.net. Listen to the episode here. www.rrr.org.au/explore/prog...

Tonight hear @jathansadowski.com in conversation with @attacus.net on his latest 📕 release ‘The Mechanic and the Luddite’. production by @rowenamurray.bsky.social 👏 Dan and me live from 7pm AEDT tonight for tech news & events too! @3rrrfm.bsky.social 📻 ❤️

If there is one leap that the infosec community consistently fails to make, it is this: people who are not like me, who have different needs and priorities, who have less time or are less technical, STILL DESERVE PRIVACY AND SECURITY.

Also feel bad for Nikolai. Done dirty first by Edison, then by Elon

so, I got a bit sick of people asking me about generative AI and @yarnspinner.dev, so I wrote some LinkedIn-style (sorry) thought leadership on the matter hey.paris/posts/genai/

Amy Kurzweil, daughter of Ray Kurzweil, apparently following into her dad's wild bullshit by mimicking dead people with computers

If you've got any interest at all in Australian history, please write a word in support of Tim Sherratt - his API keys for national archives services have been revoked, cutting off years of work building tools around them. Contact info at bottom of post. updates.timsherratt.org/2025/02/24/y...

I finished teaching my Playful Theory class, a seminar for studio artists focused on games. It was my first academic course in the post-ChatGPT era, so I tried out a few strategies to handle students potentially skimming readings and submitting AI-generated response papers. Thread🧵

“…it was possible to view additional registrant information contained within the domain name record (postal address, phone and fax number) […] accessible via developer tools” Inspect Element strikes again! www.auda.org.au/news-insight...

you are not a serious person if your fear of A.I. is “what if scary computer decide 2 extinct humans” and not the health insurance companies using it to sentence people to death

A simple experiment you can do is buy a server, set up a website with nothing on it, then look at the access logs. All day, every day, there are random systems just blasting vulnerabilities at every device on the internet. Analysts call it "background noise", executives call it "cyber attacks".

“The workers showed that it’s possible to fight back against the opaque authority of algorithms, creating transparency despite a corporation’s wishes.” spectrum.ieee.org/shipt

Less AI, more poetic computing poetic.computer By koundinya (koundinya.website)

Overheard, a woman at the pub: “I worked at that fucking costume shop, dressed as Fester, wearing a goddamn bald cap, for nine hours. If I can do that, I can do anything.”

A cast of absolute thousands at the last Byte into IT for 2024! Tune in right now!! Catch us all on the air in 2025! @attacus.net @plasmov.bsky.social me, Alexar, Eric and Mike! On @3rrrfm.bsky.social

i mounted my giant crocheted insects in my studio

Please just don't use any website's DMs for secure communication. Don't do it. Just don't. Don't do it. Please. No.

bro this is literally what robots.txt was invented to do.

me: the whole state vs state and city vs city competitiveness in Australia is silly. all places have their pros and cons. also me, proud Victorian, reviewing something written by a Queenslander:

OK, new idea. The social media platforms should implement age assurance by following the 80s/90s video game model... #auspol #socialmedia

I am emerging from a conference operations bubble to find that they’ve passed the bill that everyone, from the best to the worst people you know, think is an unworkably bad idea. And there’s still an egg shortage, so our traditional method of democratic expression has been cut off.

At one point, Twitter was the central hub of the American Internet - BECAUSE of 'lazy linking'. You knew you could find and get to almost any paper, article, news story or creative endeavor likely to interest you from Twitter. Elon didn't understand his core business and sabotaged it.

Uh… ABC… that’s not… that’s not how “rawdogging” originated www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11...

I put together a Bluesky Starter Pack for PyCon AU 2024! This is for people speaking, attending, volunteering at, and organising the event in Melbourne this weekend. Are you at #PyConAU and on BlueSky? Message me and I’ll add you! go.bsky.app/JFytL7a

Google’s Gemini AI randomly spit out a long unhinged rant at a college student: “This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. … You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please.” Jump to the last message in this transcript.

For those of you who know me: what starter packs do you think I should know about? Are there any I should ask to be added to?

Creating two massive moderation lists encompassing all bsky users—people for the Oxford comma, and people against it—so we can have two blueskies both blissfully existing unaware of the other

In most of the fields I operate in, I feel like the gains in productivity from having access to generative AI etc are outweighed by the losses from search becoming effectively useless due to generative AI etc

I don’t think it can be emphasized enough that large language models were never intended to do math or know facts; literally all they do is attempt to sound like the text they’re given, which may or may not include math or facts. They don’t do logic or fact checking — they’re just not built for that

Katie the whole brain is inconvenient, it is uncontrollable thinkmeat. electric doom wrinkles. chaos hamburger. the thoughts are also bad!! but at least the emotions make it interesting!! like oh no an intrusive thought but oooh a butterfly

what did you create today bud? maybe you created a thought about a balloon? maybe a breakfast this morning? maybe a look at a dog trotting by. maybe a heartbeat? it is incredible how much art you are making all the dang time. you are SO prolific

this is just what birds looked like 600 years ago