"The church we finished building three months ago is screeching curses pleads and bribe offers to the drones circling above it like algorithmically prophetic crows." #ShortFiction #ScienceFiction #AdversarialMetanoia

Yes, but/also: In practice, most top-down AI deployments are driven by people who explicitly want to replace hard-to-control humans (skilled, hard-to-replace experts) with controllable "just check the AI" cheaper workers. Musk or Altman aren't defending social dignity. 1/ via @tedunderwood.com

"The church we finished building three months ago is screeching curses pleads and bribe offers to the drones circling above it like algorithmically prophetic crows." #ShortFiction #ScienceFiction #AdversarialMetanoia

A second-order concern I have is overoptimistic beliefs about LLMs leading to organizational shifts in hiring, resources, work patterns, etc, not only worse from an analytical point of view but also blocking the feedback loops that would allow the organization to recognize this. via @jmberger.com

From the always interesting @ourworldindata.org. Playing with the full data set beyond the link is quite informative, although I'd love to see a way to split/filter out at least things like "oil exports" and "finance" -- very different societies and processes can map to the same $/hr time series.

👇This + similar dynamics across other fields where people want --and/or might not have the choice not-- to use AI due to competitive pressures in an increasingly extractive relationship between capital and labor. I believe... 1/

"The church we finished building three months ago is screeching curses pleads and bribe offers to the drones circling above it like algorithmically prophetic crows." #ShortFiction #ScienceFiction #AdversarialMetanoia

"The church we finished building three months ago is screeching curses pleads and bribe offers to the drones circling above it like algorithmically prophetic crows." #ShortFiction #ScienceFiction #AdversarialMetanoia

As a pure matter of political tactics I'd have kept Trump's name in entirely innocent contexts [assuming there are some] and blocked it out everywhere else; doing it like this is ham-fisted, illegal, and bonkers, all of which is of course on brand. via @drjennings.bsky.social

This sort of scam is of course among the oldest, and it scaling predates LLMs, being in some cases driven by forced labor. Still, the addition of LLMs (and later genAI) to the mix might change the dynamics significantly.

I remember when this was a theoretical/far-futurish concern... via spaceweather.com

"The best-known art forgers are driven by ego; the best, period, aren't known. She was possibly — who could ever tell — the most skillful one alive." #ShortFiction #ScienceFiction #AdversarialMetanoia

Second only to leopards eating people's faces, "relax, the guy who already tried to steal an election and is setting up the Steal The Election Taskforce isn't going to steal the next election" is certainly a position. "It won't if he's stopped now" isn't the same as "he wont" via @rmac.bsky.social

I'd be insane to say "the US just doesn't pay attention to election integrity" quoting a post by @marcelias.bsky.social but compared to the way other countries would have reacted to 2000 or J6 (cf Brazil), high-status US political actors *reek* of insular overconfidence. via @robshum.bsky.social

"Manhattan Project" although the common idiom severely underestimates what the Manhattan Project involved --link below to Brian Potter's fascinating article on it-- but it's a good reminder that the Chinese government retains its... direct approach to technical catch-up.

I know the pandemic gave us all some form or another of trauma, but --at least from outside the US-- the experience of seeing a government slowly and incompetently but surely and in the open set up the machinery of political persecution... 1/ via @metaomicsnerd.bsky.social

Yes, and I'm fast approaching the moment I'll get annoyed enough to build a private version of it as my home screen [remember home screens?]. via @pfrazee.com @kevinriggle.bsky.social

"The best-known art forgers are driven by ego; the best, period, aren't known. She was possibly — who could ever tell — the most skillful one alive." #ShortFiction #ScienceFiction #AdversarialMetanoia

This is all like a dozen kinds of criminal --and this kind of crime is never too far from the atrocious ones like e.g. human trafficking-- but on its own it's utterly hilarious. by @philippeauclair.bsky.social

I 100% agree with the overall idea: standards are part of the world's invisible infrastructure, and a basic tool of development (although like every infrastructure it can be weaponized). Of course, just because you are a developed country it doesn't mean you can't torch it. IYKWIM.

This looks interesting; the framing is of course games, but the application of AlphaZero-style methods is being incredibly fruitful elsewhere (e.g. in math) so expanding it to new kinds always opens up new applications.

I'm a white [in some contexts; in others I'm categorized as Latino] cis guy with no physical disabilities and fluent in (and sometimes even knowing what I'm talking about, I hope) math and CS: there has *never* been... via @adamserwer.bsky.social @jmberger.com

His caveat isn't casual but, again, world's slowest authoritarian zamboni. Factually, if you don't look white you can be kidnapped, tortured and deported (or just disappear). The only people not afraid are oblivious, white or high-status, which works right until it doesn't. via @alexanderfurnas.com

Deceptive article headlines are a significant form of journalistic malpractice, but this one is just perfect. 10/10, no notes. by @stephenfoleyft.bsky.social and George Steer

"ICE has been rolled back in places" and "ICE can't and won't do everything Miller wants them to" might be true but it's also true that every day ICE has operated and continues to operate is on itself a defeat for US civil society[1] via @donmoyn.bsky.social @deanbaker13.bsky.social [1] And Dems.

I tend to say that 90% of 2025 global politics is about gender violence, and given the central role of AI in politics -and who drives it and what they believe- I guess it's unsurprising that so much of AI politics is also about gender violence. via @doritreiss.bsky.social

It's not going to happen right away but sooner or later the technology gap between Chinese and US cars will be so large that even parochial US car owners will realize it and, given the central place of cars in the US psyche, the cultural shock will be *huge*. By @jackewingnyt.bsky.social .

One one hand it'd be crazy to doubt the smarts and savvy of somebody who became MI6's first female chief. On the other hand almost every quote here is utter bollocks. I'd like to think it's deliberate, but one lesson of '25 is that even the most well-resourced orgs can fall into McKinsey nonsense.

@pkrugman.bsky.social 's interview of @adamtooze.bsky.social is the best high-level view I've seen around of the current status of Europe. As Krugman says, being the most (relatively) democratic and humane of the three superpowers, one would rather wish Europe did as well as possible.

By @dsquareddigest.bsky.social. I don't think I agree with his theory of Trump et al --at a minimum, the gap between governance and governed by was deliberately expanded by cybernetic saboteurs like Fox News-- but his point about hysteresis is absolutely necessary to think about politics now.

That's a *very* informative quote: like private equity destroy businesses by viewing them as financial portfolios, "tech management" sees journalism as platforms offering "features" - not civic actors subject to asymmetric reputational risk. at @futurism.com via @shannonvallor.bsky.social

If this leads to the creation of a cleaner and faster just-be-a-browser-dammit browser --among the viable daily drivers Firefox is only good relative to a very bad set of competitors-- then this is a net win. via @cursed.monster @kevinriggle.bsky.social

My poorly named Dead Information Flow Canaries theory is that this sort of conceptual nonsense can only happen as a result of a deep institutional cognitive pathology, so as appalled as I am, I'm also worried about what I'm not seeing. via @kevinriggle.bsky.social

It is with a heavy sigh that I realize "I'm sure the Danish government is paying a lot of attention to the US' unilateral violent resource grab on Venezuela" is not just a sane thought but also a rather obvious one. via @agelston.bsky.social

"The best-known art forgers are driven by ego; the best, period, aren't known. She was possibly — who could ever tell — the most skillful one alive." #ShortFiction #ScienceFiction #AdversarialMetanoia

@jondevaan.bsky.social has every right to be. I'm old enough to have used 1-2-3 and lusted after Improv (in a better timeline...) but Excel (I'm thinking mostly of v5) was an epoch-making, awe-inspiring monster of a program in all senses of the term. To say... 1/ via @marypcbuk.bsky.social

@jennylist.bsky.social 's test drive of Haiku reminded me of BeOS,but there was something else at the tip of my tongue, and now I remembered: @dick-pountain.bsky.social 's Byte 1911 article on TAOS! Mind-blowing at the time and in a better timeline the ancestor of what I'd be running my laptop on.

I see this as exploratory data analysis --just because you figured out an equation it doesn't mean you figured out the thing-- but makes me wonder if we aren't on our way to Dijkstra-style programming where we provide information about the program to iteratively narrow a posterior we sample from.

👇This is the core of my mental model of the impact of generative AI on the creative industry. Our distribution/selection systems reward volume over quality, which means bad content displaces good content even if the audience would prefer the latter.

I find the relationship between financial structure/culture/drives and what's created fascinating, from the death of the long TV season (which killed the "filler episode" that might have been the foundation of their cultural staying power) to... 1/ via @tkingfisher.com @marypcbuk.bsky.social

"The best-known art forgers are driven by ego; the best, period, aren't known. She was possibly — who could ever tell — the most skillful one alive." #ShortFiction #ScienceFiction #AdversarialMetanoia

"The best-known art forgers are driven by ego; the best, period, aren't known. She was possibly — who could ever tell — the most skillful one alive." #ShortFiction #ScienceFiction #AdversarialMetanoia

There are a few angles to this: (1) Improving physical ability at 50+ years is a good thing on its own, (2) There's a difference between "you are feeling better so you can choose to work longer" and... 1/

Begin reading for the weird, strange palaces, keep reading for the weird, strange people who built them. At @publicdomainrev.bsky.social .

Two very different levels of improvement in computational inference, both alike in dignity: 1. [Very] abstract mathematics:

This one looks interesting. Human performance at the edge is always tricky to model ---and temptingly easy to mismeasure and oversimplify--- but ultimately whatever you learn there "flows back" and improves performance elsewhere. The extremes move, but so does the median.

This is partly accidental --Trump being an asset/admirer of Putin and easily bribable by cash-rich petrotates-- but I do believe there's a direct line between the fossil fuel industry's decades-long attack on scientific expertise... 1/ by @eniiler.bsky.social

From the POV of somebody in a country with universal, mandatory voting, the whole system of registration, voter rolls, etc, seems -and, historically, is- a way to do some tunable election rigging. I'm not a "doomer," but... 1/ by @jonshorman.bsky.social via @alexanderfurnas.com

The end of the AI bubble won't mean the technology will go away. As the financial mega-engineering unwinds [...] many of those tools will not only remain but continue to be improved. The truly seismic change will take place on the plane of fear, belief, and expectations...

No surprises in that list of countries, needlessly to say. via @jonathancohn.bsky.social