lets work on revognising the personhood of humans first, aye?

Many AI researchers draw inspiration from neuroscience. Naomi Saphra favors a different analogy. Interpretability, in her view, should take a cue from evolutionary biology.

The real generational divide is people who refuse to watch a video if it could be an article versus people who refuse to read an article if it could be a video

New scheme designed in the centre presents some difficulties for the periphery, as per usual.

A couple of years ago in Dublin Airport, I was told a story by a lady surveying passengers who used to work at check-in that a Hungarian journalist travelling with his wife tried - for a piece - to use invalid ID to get his tickets and then for an encore to smuggle a knife through security. >

"When we cease to change a program, we cease to use it." If an author reduced the reading level by six years, added 200 pages of flop-sweat anecdotes, and mentioned rainbow socks, Mountain Dew, cloud providers and AI vibe coding, we'd have a book ready for current-day thought leadership.

Included in this 1964 paper: "The person who creates one program is never free of it unless he makes it possible for others to modify his program without performing major research." A concise litany of the problems that still bedevil software design and programming. #tech

Hillel found a Mythical-man-month-anticipating, Agile-before-agile-thinking genius --

*looks out upon a world drowning in noise, contempt for knowledge, and weird storms of histrionic groupthink*: yes, I see your problem here; definitely not enough neurotypicals

Once again Keir Starmer, a sort of living batch loaf with glasses, has decided to deliver What Nobody Asked For. “Officials say the Prime Minister was determined to launch a digital ID scheme, despite Sir Tony Blair’s costly and failed attempt to roll out compulsory ID cards in the 200s.”

Jesus found an infinite loaves and fishes glitch and chose not to flood the market to maintain scarcity to maximize fishery and bakery profits

did you know gmail now has a subscriptions page where it lists all your subscriptions and you can unsubscribe from them????

"ChatGPT has the factual accuracy of improvisational comedy" is a great line

From the Sunday Independent.

🚀 Europe’s first exascale supercomputer is here! JUPITER, launched in Germany, is the EU’s most powerful system and fourth fastest worldwide. 100% powered by renewables, it has also ranked first in energy efficiency. It will boost AI, science, and climate research. Read more - europa.eu/!vcWBqW

It's not possible for my empire to have problems. My courtiers are always nervously smiling and telling me everything is great

My and Todd’s article on “Unsolved Problems in MLOps”, which the ACM are kindly publishing. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Switzerland launches Apertus, an open-source LLM trained on 15 trillion tokens in 1,000+ languages (40% non-English). Fully transparent, it complies with Swiss and EU data laws, offering data security and control for researchers and businesses. www.swiss-ai.org/apertus

Presented without commentary: Today I got a memo at work saying if we want to use an AI graphic for anything, please send it to the Graphics department so they can make it as un-AI as possible because costumers are siting the use of AI graphics as a reason for canceling their subscription.

Christopher H Bidmead’s stories got amongst me when I was growing up, and his heady mix of mathematics, philosophy, and magic plays no small part in why I ended up in the career I did. I’m glad I got a chance to tell him so. We will not see his like again.

Both my wife and I can, and we were our own wedding band (playing this) #humblebrag

I can

Some people might like www.dwmalone.net/warlock.pdf It is the connection graph for the sections in Warlock of Firetop Mountain. (Solid/dotted arrows show in-text/hidden links.) I've been working on graphs for a few FF books with the help of one of the kids. @hjdoom.bsky.social @niallm.bsky.social

essential apocalypse accessory: black mirror bingo card

I've edited this and now think it's the very best thing I've done on AI and the environment, by a wide margin andymasley.substack.com/p/i-cant-fin...

I absolutely despise this

Not unexpected, question is what will be done about it

How are different subjects doing in popularity? As a fraction, English and maths up slightly, Irish down. Geography slightly recovering from a downward slide. Modern language trends contributing. Politics and Computer Science doing well for new subjects.

My youngest wants to make a documentary about Radiohead (not uncommon, you might think) except he wants to make it about Radiohead _from the perspective of Ed O' Brien_ and call it _Anyone Can Play Guitar_. We agreed it'd consist of a lot of shots of locked doors with signs saying STUDIO: KEEP OUT

Sam Altman: I see humans achieving omnipotence using dark matter by… 2030 maybe? That’s if OpenAI is given a quadrillion dollars Theo Von: Yeah Altman: Or, we may become a race of slaves, genetically modified to be harvested by robot spiders. That’s if OpenAI doesn’t get the money Von: Right

clearskiesadam.medium.com/genai-detect... Very very interesting post, suggesting that (at least the current generation) of LLMs are detectable in their output via Pangram Labs.

This latest madcap Internet plan from the Irish Govt will have EU-wide consequences as many of the most critical encrypted messaging systems companies are based here. Use Apple’s iMessage or Meta’s WhatsApp in the EU? You should be contacting your Govt and getting them to object to Ireland’s plan.

OH: "I went into software engineering to avoid giving instructions in imprecise human language. it's been a good run"

Patient, sobbing: But Doctor, I AM Pagliacci! ChatGPT: Apologies. I didn't realise when recommending Pagliacci's epic show to cure your depression that you were the genius himself. I'm impressed! With regards to your initial question, I can recommend seeing the Great Clown Pagliacci.

"Thats not to say there haven’t been growing pains. [...] More than half the steaks that come out of the microwave get sent back by the customer. To solve this I now run ten microwaves in parallel cooking ten steaks. One out of the ten steaks will likely be good." www.colincornaby.me/2025/08/in-t...

Catchpoint SRE Survey! Please fill out: www.catchpoint.com/sresurvey2025

Fascinating how many place names are still with us from this early map of Dublin. Seems to be based on Mercator’s late 1500s map, rather than the later Down Survey.

Hello, I’m an SRE in a film. I work in a room in a datacenter that looks suspiciously like it was modeled on the NORAD scenes in WarGames. When things go wrong I shout technical-sounding panicky nonsense and wait for an 8 year old to save the day.

That feeling when the bandwidth between buildings has cratered and you do some debugging, decide you need some new equipment, buy it, then discover that this is because you adminstratively downed the interface some time ago and forgot

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

DESPITE ALL MY RAGE LET’S CIRCLE BACK AND GET ON THE SAME PAGE DESPITE ALL MY RAGE THERE ARE STILL SEVERAL METRICS TO GAUGE SOMEONE WILL SAY TURN THIS IN BY THE END OF THE DAY DESPITE ALL MY RAGE YOU DON’T NEED MY SIGN-OFF AT THIS STAGE

Another episode in the unwelcome series of "sci-fi stories you read ages ago cropping up in the news" - Ender's Game, but for Russian drones: www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Admittedly I would probably say this, but I thought this article was a very insightful analysis of the problems with building AI agents, based on real experience. (Jury currently out on the _solutions_ but at least the problems seem clearly outlined.) utkarshkanwat.com/writing/bett...

Good news everyone! The Irish Minister for Justice has announced he is going to pass legislation requiring tech companies (who mostly live in Ireland for EU purposes) to break all their encrypted messaging systems. www.q102.ie/news/q102-ne...

you would be shocked at how many legally responsible parties people are trying to replace with AI

New Gist: Age Verification is an Epic fail On Bluesky's introduction of age verification, selling us to the Fortnite guys, and how the arrogance of Ireland's regulator has seen it deliver the very outcomes it once called "bonkers". www.thegist.ie/the-gist-age...

Seems likely that training runs would exclusively take place in the US

Incredibly important report on AI training & copyright released today by the European Commission. It gets lots right, slamming the idea that creators should be required to opt-out of having their works used for free by AI companies. It says: - Generative AI must be based on opt-in consent 🧵 1/n

the anemone of my anemone is my frond

From 21st July 2025, Ireland’s regulator will be enforcing age checks at the door for social media sites. Recording who comes in. Or requiring sites to apply not one but TWO separate content bans. One of which is material deemed likely to “impair the physical, mental or moral development”