to the contrary, this is an amazing opportunity for cartels to launder drug money into legally owned American assets

Let's make a 6x6 grid of film x style The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Tolstoy) 1984 (Orwell) Waiting for Godot (Beckett) Ulysses (Joyce) The Chrysalids (Wyndham) The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood) 16th century woodcut engraving Ukiyo-e Rubber Hose Disney Renaissance (1990s) Studio Ghibli Pixar contemporary

Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

Paper out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com: 1) those groups (women, African Americans, lower SES, rural) that are underrepresented in science have been less trusting of science. 2) If you improve representation in science, you improve trust among those groups. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

These are quite good (though it failed at the grid)! "Please generate a 3x3 grid of non-anachronistic historically accurate New Yorker style cartoons about artificial intelligence, one for each decade starting 1940"

Ah, you're awake! Hit your head pretty hard there. Neoliberalism what!? Donald who!? Modal Logic? Incompleteness Theorems? Large Language Models? Hitler? Oh yes, he's a fringe politician in Munich. Come on, let's get you up. We have a lot of work to do unifying science and eliminating metaphysics.

Sure, Gemini 3 is very smart, but also I accidentally convinced it that we were in a simulated future by switching model mid-conversation...

One fun thing that ChatGPT's transformer based image generation model can do (arguably better than other kinds). Give it a random selection of 10 images and ask it to mash them together into a harmonious new image inspired by those images. The results are always chaotically entertaining.

recently discovered that wikipedia volunteers have a hilariously high bar for what constitutes "unusual death"

I’ve been casual student of physics for four decades. Why did no one ever explain to me so clearly what a conservation law is? From Susskind and Hrabovsky (2014) The Theoretical Minimum. — This is why reading basic material from brilliant thinkers is so often worth the investment.

Humanity’s quest for a theory of everything drives much of science, but can we ever truly know the universe? | https://bit.ly/47gHJqU Philosopher of science JB Manchak argues that even with all possible perspectives, it’s impossible to grasp the full structure of spacetime from within. #philsci 🧪

Personally I think we should use AI to raise prices on video games which should hopefully free up our time to work out what exact provisos should exist for trans girls in youth sports teams in the coming middle eastern peace settlement.

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv. There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

The next talk in this series is on Wednesday (8th Oct, 3pm). It features @alicehelliwell.bsky.social from NU London and Amaritpal Singh Saini from News UK, speaking about 'The Power and Potential of Generative AI'. All welcome! Register here (in person or online): www.fdmgroup.com/us/understan...

The Computational Philosophy Lab at Northeastern University London has teamed up with FDM to deliver a series of lectures on Understanding AI. Come along, in person or online! Speakers are Alice Helliwell, David Freeborn, Ioannis Votsis, and Brian Ball. www.fdmgroup.com/understandin...

NU London Philosopher David Freeborn (@dpwf0.bsky.social) presents work by the Computational Philosophy Lab at the Ethics and AI conference at Warsaw University of Technology. Read more about the lab's work here: cpl.sites.northeastern.edu

The first talk in this series is next week (Wednesday 1st October), featuring David Freeborn @dpwf0.bsky.social from NU London and Gillian Magee from AstraZeneca, speaking about AI Ethics in Action: Mapping Responsible AI. Register below to attend in person or online!

We're pleased to announce an exciting new lecture series in October, in collaboration with FDM. They feature an academic from NU London's Computational Philosophy Lab, paired up with industry specialists. Sign up to attend in person (near London Bridge) or online. www.fdmgroup.com/understandin...

Don't miss NU London philosophers Christoph Schuringa @schuringa.bsky.social and Naomi Goulder at How the Light Gets In festival this weekend at Kenwood House. They are both on a panel with Timothy Williamson and @nigelwarburton.bsky.social, on Sunday 21st. howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/lo...

one of the wildest bits of discourse, is the idea that we can just ban ai we cannot ban ai. code is speech and you can run these models on a 4080. there's no putting this genie back in the bottle.

More coverage of NU London philosopher Christoph Schuringa's recent book. Read below!

Now officially published here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

It's quite funny that fairly early in its history philosophy invented writing well (Plato) and reasoning well (Aristotle) and made it clear you can only do one; subsequently clarifying that we'll typically do neither.

TIL the original paper describing CRISPR, by Francisco Mojica, was rejected by 4 journals and took 2 years to be published

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

My new paper has been accepted at Synthese! I tackle an ongoing problem with the learning of compositional communication in conventional signaing games. I build two new models to show that structured receivers can learn and retain compositional information. philpapers.org/rec/FRECUI-2

The distribution of the Red-billed chough is absolutely bizarre.

Sometimes I look at my bibliographies and think... I bet these papers have never been cited together before.

STAGGERING: This new study of 133 countries is the first to estimate the impact of all USAID’s work. In 2 decades, it has saved *92M* lives. Current cuts, if not reversed, are forecast to cost up to *14M* lives thru 2030. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

In our latest paper, we discovered a surprising result: training LLMs with self-play reinforcement learning on zero-sum games (like poker) significantly improves performance on math and reasoning benchmarks, zero-shot. Whaaat? How does this work?

Check out this fascinating and detailed interview with NU London's Christoph Schuringa @schuringa.bsky.social, speaking about his new book A Social History of Analytic Philosophy! www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_iu...

Excited to be at Ford's innovation space in the Stratford Olympic Park, for a Conversations On AI event on how we can use AI to innovate for human benefit. The panel features NU London Philosophy's own Hossein Dabbagh, and the event series is organised by alumni from our MA Philosophy and AI

The games business is about games. If you’re in the games business, and somehow (as often happens) your company somehow is now focused on something else (AI, XR, “IP,” acquisitions, etc.) you’re in for a period of struggle. Everyone will wonder what’s wrong. But you know. It’s about games. Gameplay.

Anthropic has scored a major victory in an ongoing legal battle over AI models and copyright, with big implications for the many AI lawsuits winding through the US legal system. By @knibbs.bsky.social: www.wired.com/story/anthro...

There's no way scientists are only just now learning about grad school

I decided to become a journalist aged fifteen after reading ‘1984’ and being appalled at the thought that governments could rewrite history. Orwell knew the USSR did it. Now China pretends the Tiananmen massacre didn’t happen. It did. I was there, and saw it for myself.

Four charts showing the extent of cuts to NASA in the FY26 budget: - Cuts to every science division - Smallest science funding since 1984 - 19 active, inflight missions cancelled - Smallest NASA budget since FY 1961

Delighted to be at the launch of the The Computational Philosophy Lab at Northeastern University London. Brian Ball is giving the welcome talk. Later we will hear from @alicehelliwell.bsky.social @dpwf0.bsky.social, @tessbuckley.bsky.social amongst others. Learn more here: cpl.sites.northeastern.edu

Huge News: The Computational Philosophy Lab (CPL) is launching tomorrow at 10:00! The CPL will be the UK's first and premier centre dedicated to computationally-enabled & AI-enhanced philosophy. Location: Devon House 58 Saint Katharine's Way, London, E1W 1LP www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-comput...

It would be hard to overstate the ongoing costs of the public sector's use of Big IT vendors. Stunning that it's still ongoing, 15 years after GDS started the fight to escape. I'm thinking, e.g. major systems provided by CGI, Accenture, et al, that are 20+ years behind today's digital services. 1/n

This is a view from the surface of Comet 67P. The busy particles in the foreground are cosmic rays or bits of dust and ice. The dots moving in the background are stars.

Well worth reading to get a sense of the scale of the cuts to public science funding in the US. It might take decades to recover from this damage. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

This is absolutely terrible news. With the shifting regulatory climate (i.e., antivax ratfuckery), Moderna has withdrawn their application for their eagerly anticipated COVID-flu combo vaccine. This vaccine offered better protection than getting each shot separately. h/t @merz.bsky.social

Clearly I have more influence than I thought! xAI claim they will now publish Grok's system prompts openly on GitHub.

Join us for the launch of the Computational Philosophy Lab, the UK's first and premier centre dedicated to computationally-enabled and AI-enhanced philosophy. Date: May 30 • 10:00 am Location: Devon House 58 Saint Katharine's Way, London, E1W 1LP www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-comput...

Grok is an extreme example, but in general the lack of transparency means we don't know what biases major LLMs are picking up implicitly, or probably in this case being explicitly given. I think there's a good case for making system prompts public (whilst keeping model weights private).

If you wish to train a large language model from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

They’re here 🎉 @versobooks.bsky.social