"if you run that forward just four decades,” Wagner says, “we’re talking about nearly half the tree of life disappearing in one human lifetime. That is absolutely catastrophic.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Summary of the bill that just passed. All the environmental/climate rollbacks are despair-inducing enough, but also 14215 and the other power-consolidation tactics .... oof www.reddit.com/media?url=ht...

Apparent unknown species of bacteria (named Niallia tiangongensis) discovered in China's Tiangon space station #astrobiology 🔭🧪🧫🔬 www.sciencealert.com/unknown-spec... www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

2025, and it's news that "women's pain should be treated". in 2019 I had an IUD put in with no anesthetic, it hurt like hell and I had 6 months of debilitating cramps before I got it taken out (I sometimes couldn't walk, or threw up). I was encouraged by the (female) doctor to leave it in.

These boxes are not moving. A mind-bending optical illusion by Japanese artist Jagarikin.

I greatly enjoyed “The Spectrum of AI Risks” panel at the Singapore Conference on AI. Thanks @teganmaharaj.bsky.social for great moderating, Max Tegmark for the invitation, and the organizers and other panelists for a great event! PS. Do I really have sad resting panel face? 😐

And you thought the left was censorious. How about actual censoring?

BREAKING: NSF has frozen all grant funding, as of yesterday. It's unclear when they will resume funding awards, or why the pause has been put in place. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

May Day Reminder: The Federal Minimum Wage - in the richest country EVER - is still only $7.25/hr. UNACCEPTABLE.

Does this seem true to you? Why or why not? It seems plausible to me, but definitely not certain.

www.cbc.ca/news/science... :'( 84%

Disaster Preparedness for AI Safety -- Just gave a talk at the #ICLR #Alignment workshop on a new report I'm working on - if you would like to contribute or chat about it, please get in touch!

👀 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

This was dope. Brief, not a line wasted. Sums up vast literatures + outlines a problem among the most important in all of bio. An "opinion" piece w/ as much depth as many reviews. "Fighting change with change: adaptive variation in an uncertain world" Working link: bio.utexas.edu/research/mey...

For #rstats people working on computing environments without GUI, you should check out the package `txtplot`. E.g. this density plot is pretty useful to get an idea what my data looks like:

👉 👈 Meta announced that they're changing their models to reduce "left-leaning [political] bias"--that means leaning them to the political "right". Lots to unpack about what that might mean. So I ran a quick "shot in the dark" study...and found a *political right* bias in Meta models. Some notes.🧵

📢Curious why your LLM behaves strangely after long SFT or DPO? We offer a fresh perspective—consider doing a "force analysis" on your model’s behavior. Check out our #ICLR2025 Oral paper: Learning Dynamics of LLM Finetuning! (0/12)

I'm in Singapore for ICLR! Msg me if you'd like to meet and chat about responsible AI, risk (assessment), disaster preparedness, international collaboration, sustainability, etc 🧷🌏🌱☮️🛟

Latest in the global clawing back of civil rights: Is a woman a woman if she says she's a woman? No! Says a bunch of old British dudes in costumes - a woman is whoever the patriarchal legal system (invented when women were property) says is a woman. 🤦🏽‍♀️

It's very thin

It's the entire International Maritime Organization, which includes China, Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, most South Pacific islands, and most of Europe. US notably absent 🙄. A fixed rate isn't ideal, but I'm taking any international collab step in the right direction as great news rn!

"Preventing nuclear war means preventing the use of nuclear weapons as both blackmail and bombs." "What can Sweden, Finland, and Poland teach the United States about confronting Russia’s nuclear threats?" by Marlena Broeker, current Scoville Fellow for @nukesofhazard.bsky.social.

e/acc logic: (What is the u?)

Our systematic lit review of algorithm audits, with a focus on linguistic and geographical disparities in the field, is now officially accepted at @facct.bsky.social 🎉🪩 You can read the preprint here! arxiv.org/abs/2401.11194 Looking forward to presenting this one in Athens in June :)

Join us on April 17th for Mila TechAide 2025! 🌟 Hear from amazing speakers in #AI like Sara Hooker, Kyunghyun Cho, Golnoosh Farnadi, David Adelani, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, and Tegan Maharaj. All proceeds support #Centraide. Let's make a difference together! 💡🤝 Get your tickets now! t.co/EBsatAqGTA

New Paper! I'm truly excited to share @natematias.bsky.social and my new Policy Forum in Science published yesterday. We evaluate science's ability to address technological harms, and offer recommendations for what could be done to improve on the status quo: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I've been doing the news 3-4 days on, 3-4 days off since January - highly recommend.

i gave a talk this morning mapping the surveillance AI pipeline, where i spent a substantial amount of time explaining how the cycle from data -> AI -> surveillance is intentionally obfuscated. this article would have saved me time with its relative transparency www.npr.org/2025/04/09/g...

"We provide many avenues for all voices to be heard. Importantly, we ask that this be done in a way that does not cause a business disruption. If that happens, we ask participants to relocate” www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die. Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

TIME's cover story this week is about using genetic engineering to bring back a recently-extinct species. I don't know the technical details of this case, which may or may not be as awesome as it sounds. But some thoughts on this topic in general as a conservation biologist: 🧵 🧪🌎

This is probably the most sinister thing to come out of this whole mess so far imo, because Lutnick (almost accidentally) makes the vision here crystal clear — using a combination of automation and precarious, immiserated American labor to mass produce products that profit tech oligarchs.

My thoughts on risk from a decade of expertise (also, where have I been the last 6 months?) teganmaharaj.neocities.org/blog www.linkedin.com/pulse/latest...

idiocracy didn't have jokes this on-the-nose

What in the 'edgy' boomer humour racist stereotype-promoting bs is this ad campaign @lasaq.bsky.social ?? Shameful. Hope these people got a good paycheck for being used like this.

The man behind DOGE's "AI-first" strategy, the 28 year-old ex-Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd, has quietly—and possibly illegally—become the head of technology for the Department of Labor. My latest: www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/doges-ai-f...

The only vibe this gets right is /r/menwritingwomen This is such bad/mid writing I can't read it without cringing. Tell us you barely read books without telling us you barely read books.

at this stage, there's a robust body of work exposing the unreliability and limitations of llms but what will it take for governments, businesses, and other large institutions to rid critical social infrastructure off llms

In TIME, Tharin hits on the intense BigTech push and my AGI-Hype paradox: "AI can be so brilliant that it will solve the world’s problems, using solutions we didn't think of, yet not so brilliant that it can’t escape whatever control constraints we think of". Seems odd, no? time.com/7267797/ai-l...

I talk up a lot of AI governance stuff (licensing, registration, compute limits, audits), but one of the most important that is talked about the least is regulation of data brokers. Data is currency; this sector should be tighter regulated than banks but it's NOT REGULATED AT ALL

Sorry everyone, turns out it's too hard to go to Mars. Instead we're bringing Mars to you. It's gonna be desolate and shitty here now

There's a lot going on, but we should not let this slip under the radar—Google and OpenAI are cynically seizing on the Trump admin's hawkish, US-first AI policy instincts to make a play at gutting artists' copyright protections once and for all. www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/openai-and...

In his first term I joked to a friend that this might happen

OK, gonna throw this spicy bomb out there. If you're fortunate enough to have disposable income, then right now it is your duty to use that income wisely. You have agency over how you spend it and you should own how you spend it. Your decisions do, in fact, affect stock prices of big corporations.

I know this first hand. When I was a child, my entire community was branded as spies and sabateurs, justifying our internment inside barbed wire camps for years without due process, trial or charge.

guys they're going to stop feeding TSA's bomb-sniffing dogs, per Fox News nat security correspondent: