I find the concept of "AI alignment" to be very irritating. Also, why does everything have to have a stupid name? Just make the thing that does the job, don't turn making the thing that doesn't do the job into a whole valiant new field of endeavour

I'm currently working on a piece of research to understand the limits of assurance for LLMs while also working with a public body to help them write best practice guidelines for implementing LLMs, and it is *shocking* to me how little is communicated to corporate purchasers about reliability

I mean, we all complain about social media but where else are you going to get Alondra Nelson sharing Nancy Fraser writing about Habermas? 💕💕💕

The two states of having a job are basically, "Oh no why hasn't that person emailed me back, is everything okay, do they hate me?" and "CAN EVERYONE STOP EMAILING ME I'M TRYING TO DO SOME WORK".

Remarkably concise thread offering a glimpse into a whole other world

I'm just over halfway through the consultation now and think this ministerial introduction is really concerning, because if one only read the intro and not the following 80-something pages of the doc, you'd get a very partial view of what is being considered. The focus here is on joined-up gov

This is part of it, but there's another huge part being said out loud within government. That the digital entity that is "you" will become the same one across all services. The gap between these two pillars is a problem we need to address.

Lovely sensible M&S being very clear and sensible.

Oh wow I was wrong, Disney fully exiting

In Brussels, where I have dramatically thrown caution to the wind by entertaining a 3pm double espresso, as if my very presence in continental europe has halved my age and doubled the speed of my metabolism

There's a whole bunch of different actors from outside the US who see for various reasons (sovereignty, sustainability, safety and reliability) agree there should be alt pathways for AI development, beyond the US/Silicon Valley LLMs to GPAI pathway and everyone agrees the problem is funding

Spending this morning going through the Digital ID consultation. I've been quite impressed by some of the decisions made by govt around the consultation but the actual doc doesn't fill me with confidence anyone knows what they're talking about. Digital ID is, apparently, not just an ordinary log-in.

I've lived in London 30 years and honestly still find it to be the most exciting place in the world. Up with the lark to get an early train and the thrill of being in a cab in the different early morning city, seeing the streets light up in the springtime fog, is like being somewhere totally new.

I am being very very good at not reading dog-whistle newspaper columns just now, but - in my defence - it did not occur to me that "person who is good at inventing games invents another game and so must be greedy" was an opinion it was possible to have www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This absolutely gets to the heart of the matter. The work I'm doing on assurance at moment seems to indicate that it is currently very very very difficult to set narrow enough boundaries around general purpose tools to haves meaningful confidence in their accuracy or ability to be fit for purpose

I did my bit and responded to this consultation. Short thread coming up. 1. The call for response bizarrely includes the same questions twice. I have no idea why the did this. 2. Although the questions are formatted as if they were intended for an interactive form, in fact it seems that ...

This HMRC consultation is interesting regarding what govt thinks running a small business entails www.gov.uk/government/c... and I think it assumes that most small businesses deal in high volumes of small transactions

Absolutely unable to cope with either "Daddy! Fences" or "Daddy! Snacks"

The thing is the *entire internet* is different now than it was a decade ago (and, largely, not for the better). All of this is interrelated and there's no going *backwards* only forward. So work for a better future, don't angle for a return to an idealized past.

When I was doing speculative futures work 20 years ago, it didn't occur to me that in 2026 I'd be listening to my teenager play Black Sabbath songs on an electric guitar while very proudly wearing* a Nirvana t-shirt. (*him not me)

No

While it pains me to admit that Rachel (along with Clare and Anna) are the female versions of Matt/Ben/Tom/Dan (almost toxically prevalent middle-aged, middle-ish class names) these kind of things do always give me pause

I wrote this long thread to pre-empt the Doctorow fan boys when the inevitably come for me, but the tl;dr is: don't bother reading this blog post by a high-profile man being a baby, because it is not very good and you could do something more fun instead

There are many differently things one could say about this blog post. I spend a lot of time thinking about the tension between technology adaptation in the context of Audre Lord's "the master's tools" assertion, and for me Doctorow gets this completely wrong doctorow.medium.com/william-gibs...

I unexpectedly have some free time in Brussels on Tuesday (mix of bad planning and change of plans on my part) so in the market for recs for excellent lunch spots or unexpected culture or even random AI conferences I can pop into ...?

Late to Rachel Reeves' Mais lecture and I've missed all the analysis doing the rounds but this did make me chuckle www.gov.uk/government/s... "a sovereign edge" is an objectively entertaining concept I think www.gov.uk/government/s...

How Pakistan’s people-led solar boom is easing impact of Middle East energy crisis www.theguardian.com/environment/...

A sample slide from my lecture yesterday. Should have added fun - but I did say "fun" out loud.

I did a panel last night on "reclaiming our social life from big tech", and I'm left with two niggling thoughts. One is straightforward and the other somewhat unresolved. The straightforward one is that (IMHO) we should all feel like we have permission to do more fun stuff, find more joy.

Nice write-up of our women and the future of AI panel at the Royal Society last week www.newscientist.com/article/2519...

Nothing like the thrill of picking up a new batch of stickers societyforhopefultechnologists.org

While clearly Habermas was an intellectual giant whose influence spanned decades, pretty much the measure of the man is all the nice little snippets coming up: waiting in line to go to his own talks, going to the pub for a chat afterwards. No "well actually" side-eye stories. Be more Habermas!

Just went to see Project Hail Mary and Astronaut Ryan Gosling's commitment to trimming his hair is exemplary.

I am casting a beady eye at all the UK commentators who, this time last year, wrote clickbaity treatises on the need for a UK DOGE, and note that position lost no important men any credibility, while the reality of the implantation cost many, many lives

Currently feeling like I could write a 10,000 word essay about the array of emotions that arise when your teenager can casually reach for things you usually have to stand on a chair to reach. 👵🏼 (It is v odd to know you will never again be taller than the person you used to frequently carry around)

This Tuesday! Last few tickets

Oof #1 www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

Ooh I weirdly got invited to do a "debate" at this event and it appears to be a long weekend of every kind of bizarre dog whistle, accompanied by music from the actor Damian Lewis (?)

I was on a panel this week at the Royal Society, talking about AI and the future of women in science, and Wendy Hall asked us about the consequences of a future without women working in AI. And my reply was that we don't need to imagine that future. It's here. It's the present.

While being aware that there 1001 reasons to stop using gmail, the level of intrusiveness of the grammar correction and the full-on autopopulating of imaginary email replies is going to drive me to commit a murder.

@smeekings.bsky.social nice to see you here! I *loved* your talk at the Royal Society yesterday

🦊 We cannot meaningfully separate everyday usage of “AI” from the machine of death and war. If you’re upset by the military-industrial complex? These tools feed it; they *are* it. ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/propel...

And it's not always obvious military tech. I remember as a software dev in the 90's, the US DoD just paid suppliers really well. That subsidised the development of software like video and data conferencing. Even self scanning devices for supermarkets. The military does all the things/has the $$$

So much of the tech we use day-to-day has deep roots in military R&D, and we now have that R&D playing out in real-time. Thinking about this too deeply makes me want to vomit giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

There is a case, particularly in the UK right now for trusted community spaces that help people communicate and collaborate - beyond the usual offerings of BSky and Discord. The question is, who wants to invest in making it happen? The engineering isn't the problem here, but the legal and financial

Hi! If you send me DMs here, I can't read them as I haven't done, and won't be doing, age verification. (Also, Bluesky! Why do you let people send DMs to people who can't read them?)

This is the first time I have understood the discourse for several weeks and I'm Team Badger.

While I agree that Doge kids having full access to US social security numbers (which seem to be designed as unresetable personal secrets?), don't get cocky that it isn't happening here. If you have a big pile of data, people exfiltrate it. More or less end of.

Outing myself as being inadvertently heightist and not acknowledging the tote-based advantages of being 165cm tall.

I would probs go to a one-hour illustrated talk that was comprised only of pictures of men who are too anxious about feminine-coded behaviour to wear the straps of tote bags over their shoulders.