Don't forget you can still order your pre-order copy of my forthcoming "Littoral Commander: Australia!" It is the first expansion featuring new national forces and a collaboration with the Australian Army Battle Lab! 🦘 💥 🎲 dietzfoundation.org/product/litt...

Starlinks for Ukraine are paid for by the Polish Digitization Ministry at the cost of about $50 million per year. The ethics of threatening the victim of aggression apart, if SpaceX proves to be an unreliable provider we will be forced to look for other suppliers.

The more you make the back end unreliable, the more the front end is eschewed. Nobody is buying your kit if you signal you will brick it on a whim.

“Al seems to have more godparents than even Sleeping Beauty. And, regrettably, more than one significant prick.” 😂

AI Anne Frank bothsidesing the Holocaust in today’s dystopian nightmare.

Look, I’ve no doubt Trump wants to play hardball with Canada in trade negotiations and that we’re in for hurt. But the annexation talk is a negotiating tactic, same as him insisting that we have nothing the US needs. It is meant to rattle Canadian leadership, which is in flux right now.

Australians low-key anxious today that Trump wants to annex Canada and not them.

“Bluesky is an echo chamber” Yes of course it is, I tailored it to my taste, interests, opinions, and community. I’m here to have a good time, not argue with strangers lmao

I have been taking my time deciding whether to restart a social media presence here and had just started crafting content again. But I’m not going to if community protection isn’t taken seriously here. This sort of thing has killed friends of mine. @safety.bsky.app

The Australian Army's Battle Lab led the development of the Australian expansion for my "Littoral Commander" #wargame series. Roughly 100+ copies will be delivered to various Australian units. A commercial variant will be released later in 2025. #wargaming 🎲

Accidentally closed the app after an hour of composing my first long-form thread and lost it all, so fuck this, I’m going to bed. Taking recommendations for a different piece of software to draft skeets with before posting to here.

superb point: if we take Sam Altman at his word about the relative risk of the tech he's gleefully building, we should all be hunting him for sport

For the last two years my daughter and I have done a personal art piece for my department’s Secret Santa before Christmas. This year I did one for our Centre’s program coordinator. Lately she’s been wanting the Untitled Goose Game goose instead of dragons. 🪿

I can run my mouth for hours in front of an auditorium with hundreds of military officers but have completely forgotten how to social media.

We strongly suggest that academic publishers and other platforms that host research rapidly implement a Share to Bluesky button for their articles. Here's how: docs.bsky.app/docs/advance... #AcademicSky #HigherEd #Altmetrics

Basically: autistic people have less neural pruning of synaptic connections as babies and toddlers, but this thick density of connections on the small scale within a region, ends up decreasing connectivity *between* regions. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles...

The obvious way to kill military AI in decision support. Accelerate the production of synthetic data. Rubbish in. Rubbish out. Bring on model collapse and force the adversary to fall back on static data. Back to bombs and bullets before you can say boo to a goose.

I love the nuclear block and respect the work folks at Bsky are doing in T&S spaces, BUT. The underlying design of the site regarding things like blocks being visible to API are profoundly dangerous, cursed foundations that could turn the nuclear block into a Maginot Line.🧵

These folks did a great job of breaking, well, *all* the leading LLMs by asking the models an incredibly simple question. These models should not be relied upon to assist anyone with reasoning. Check out the appendix with examples of truly wild confabulations and errors arxiv.org/html/2406.02...

Hot off the press and pulling no punches: Allan English’s “The 2024 Defence Policy Update and its Predecessors: Why the CAF is in a ‘Death Spiral’.” The CAF is in serious trouble, but is it interested in change or perception management? Yes, that’s rhetorical. scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcont...

*tiptoes over, sets this down, scurries back into deep cave*

For the record: you call the police non-emergency line and ask whether they have an officer who coordinates tracking people who are at elevated SWAT risk (and if so, ask to be transfered to them). If not, ask to speak to the captain of the SWAT unit.

Though politicians have compared Hamas to al-Qaeda since Oct. 7, the groups have different aims and fighting Hamas requires different tactics, writes NDU’s Kim Cragin in this week’s Foreign Policy Essay.

In the Spring of 1864 Twain, while working as a beat reporter for the SF Morning Call, Twain witnessed the murder of a Chinese laborer by a mob that included cops. It radicalized him. He wrote it up, one of the first things he ever authored which he thought deserved to be called “literature”… 2/

Hey, you! You want to make a horror game? Let me tell you how to make it good: docseuss.medium.com/your-horror-...

Via Vincent Proce on Twitter (@vproceart) some hope vs the Ai glut (repost to add alt text)

I saw someone call it mansplaining as a service, not just the unwanted explaining but the high inaccuracy and high confidence, and I do think that explains both who makes it and who is pushing it

When "tech" meant faster computers and smaller phones, it was exciting, you wanted to know what they were going to come up with next. Now it's a bunch of assholes trying to figure out new ways to charge you a subscription to look at the shittiest ads you can imagine

Nasa: do not stare directly at the sun in the upcoming solar eclipse The entirety of America:

This is one of the primary goals of "AI" these days: to create an empty chair that takes the blame for corporate misconduct. We didn't discriminate, the AI told us who to hire. We didn't wrongfully reject the health insurance claim, the AI told us to. And on and on.

I wrote a piece about how we ended up in a political environment where legitimate research and government action on disinfo has been chilled by a bunch of people crying "censorship!" when they themselves are the ones doing the censoring and intimidation. www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

1930s South African medical journals. The obituaries are wild: Obit #1: 5-page memorial to beloved Afrikaner doctor; testimonials; complete list of notables at the funeral. Obit #2: “Found dead at the wheel of his car, syringe next to him. Wife is on holiday in Jo’burg. Should someone tell her?”

Today’s kick in the gut. British Indian Medical Journal, 1933: “Case of a seven year old boy with gonorrhoea. Maybe he got it by accident from one of the house servants?” Same Journal: “Boys with gonorrhoea are weird but we see young girls with it all the time, wonder why that is. It is a mystery.”

I wrote something: “Male Historians Explain Things To Me: masculinity, expertise and the academy”. With a huge debt to Rebecca Solnit, Sara Ahmed, Siri Hustvedt, Professor Lucy Robinson and many other feminists before me. www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781...

There are some jaw-dropping infringements here, including an image where DALL-E apparently copies the entire Pixar universe from the single two-word prompt, "animated toys".

Someone else already did this in the comments but it’s deeply funny to me how true this is, as literally shown by asking Chat-GPT what the poem is about.

My #ManeuverWarfare #cardgame #wargame is up for pre-order from @thedietzfoundation.bsky.social! It’s a deck construction game that puts #futurewar in your (cargo) pocket. Designed to be played by the warfighter anytime, anywhere, even your truck’s tailgate! dietzfoundation.org/product/mane...

In her latest research, @koltai.bsky.social delves deep into the dirty side of AI, exposing an AI Porn company’s tool that’s being used to generate nonconsensual deepfake pornography and alleged CSAM. www.bellingcat.com/news/2023/11...

Today’s parenting: “it’s rubbing off with a bit of spit, so it can’t be gangrene.”

Our new AI water paper is out! Updates include water withdrawal vs. consumption and scope definition. In 2027, global AI May withdraw 4-6 billion cubic meters of scope 1&2 water, equivalent to to 4-6 Denmark or half of UK! That’s really a lot of water! arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271

By now, I'm guessing most have already seen the news on our new project, Nightshade. Lots of artists sharing it, but here's the article from MIT Technology Review (tyvm to the wonderful Melissa Heikkila). This is a thread explaining Nightshade & its goals www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1...

new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1...

I write a regular military technology newsletter for the fine folks at Wavell Room - latest issue out today, on Iron Dome. Sign up for free on the WR website!

What a shock. slate.com/technology/2...