I’ve never been a Gates fanboy but I note that the passion project of the tech bloke who was the world’s richest man when I was a teen was about saving millions of lives, not ending them.

The robot apocalypse hasn't happened yet, but still I can't escape the feeling that something has gone horribly wrong... Cartoon for Dutch newspaper @trouw.nl. More of my work for Trouw: www.trouw.nl/cartoons/tje... #ArtificialIntelligence #creativity #work #GenerativeAI

Thanks for the thoughts! I read that study mostly through the angle of education, and to me the key takeaway (explicitly made by the authors) is that early AI use when coding prevents the acquisition of the very skills later needed for effective use of AI in coding. (Cf. Breakdown of participants...

Lots of half-baked commentary about Anthropic’s Jan 28 paper about AI coding assistants arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245 . Firstly it is not primarily about productivity. But how AI use affects on-the-job learning. A thread of observations 🧵

Me 5 years ago: “people believe wrong things because they lack education. if only people had access to the *facts*” Me today: “facts mean nothing against tribal loyalties and storytelling—even Grok knows the score” (screenshot from X)

Code and data files (downloaded from the CORE conference portal) available here: gist.github.com/tobycmurray/...

Forget Fortune’s paywall. Read the original report here gptzero.me/news/neurips/

New ICORE conference rankings are out. Theory, logic and formal methods seem to have been heavily penalised. I vibe coded an analysis of, for each Field of Research (FOR), how many associated venues increased or decreased in rank. Here's the summary. FOR 4613 had 13 venues decrease their rank! 1/2

An implication of this work seems to be that using these LLMs in a “therapy-like context” made them *more prone* to harmful behaviour. x.com/anthropicai/...

Hi @bsky.app @pfrazee.com - is it possible that we could have Trending topics for countries other than the US? Australia would certainly thank you and likely the UK and Canada as well !

It turns out Sydney’s, ahem, crap sewerage system is behind the spate of shark attacks there in the last couple days. Pumping untreated sewerage into the harbour not only makes the sea gross after heavy rain, but also has the, err, flow-on effect of attracting sharks www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...

In January 1976 I started work on a Masters thesis in Machine Learning in the math dept at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia (that dept's most famous graduate, Terence Tao, was only six months old). I have officially been full time in AI for fifty years now.

I’d argue that the rise of AI has revealed to those of us who teach that, just perhaps, it was us who were cheating ourselves all along, that we were testing for understanding and not merely task proficiency. As educators it is our job to distinguish those who understand from those who think they do

AI and the Corporate Capture of Knowledge More than a decade after Aaron Swartz's death, the United States is still living inside the contradiction that destroyed him. Swartz believed that knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, should be freely accessible. Acting on that, he downloaded…

Can’t imagine a better dickhead detector than a generative AI model allowing nudification and invoked by (public) tweet, and whose results are also published tweets

This is such a wicked problem but one that lawmakers absolutely need to grapple with

“It’s almost like you succeed because of your passion rather than because of your confidence.” - Prof Emma Johnston AO, FAAS. Vale. A shocking loss of an inspiring leader. www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/new...

📢 Calling Aussie #cybersecurity companies Want to go to #RSAC2026 as part of the AusTrade delegation in March? EoIs close 21 December so don't miss out https://bit.ly/4iYVcbn

To the beautiful people of my former home of North #Bondi, Australia holds you in its broken heart tonight. In Bondi we always felt so safe, so alive. It’s devastating that that was destroyed today. To the Jewish community, always so central to the heart of Bondi, we are so incredibly sorry.

Thinking of all the colleagues and friends I have who are connected to Brown University. What a devastating day for Brown, and for all of us.

Let’s be real. There’s only one thing that matters: harm reduction. Let’s see social media platforms implement proper mechanisms to reduce harm. Brittle age checks are blunt policy against a complex kaleidoscope of cause and effect

New on my blog: 50 years of proof assistants lawrencecpaulson.github.io/2025/12/05/H...

In Orwell’s 1984 “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” But in a future in which human thought happens *in collaboration with Generative AI*, we risk the sanctity of those precious few centimetres—-unless we innovate now to prevent oncoming surveillance.

not true

I'm hiring again! 2 postdoc positions (3-years). Australian citizenship required. Join my lab to research scalable human-centred AI for decision support in defence, balancing scalable decision support and human control in complex environments. Details: uqtmiller.github.io/recruitment/

This is super sensible and overdue. Where does one sign? I’d also propose the following bits of hacklore misplaced advice: - using Signal in place of iMessage or WhatsApp. - having family “codewords” to detect when a scammer deepfakes your kids

Thought-provoking piece from @alankohler.bsky.social including quoting @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11...

Given they quoted Rivest, they really missed an opportunity to title this piece “Why Ronnie can’t decrypt”

Big win for the UK

"Bibliometrics are to research assessment what diagnostic imaging is to medicine." Are you kidding me? When was the last time somebody optimised for the outcome of a medical imaging test? Bibliometrics create perverse incentives, unlike medical imaging tests for medical diagnosis.

New piece w/ James Evans in Science explores what we call 'science after science', an era where our ability to control nature may exceed our ability to understand it; a new struggle to sustain curiosity & understanding under AI's predictive dominance. #ai #science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I don’t miss Twitter, but I do miss being able to look at the list of trending topics and having the faintest clue what they might each be about

Andrew’s conclusions here are spot on, IMO, and should be instilled in every PhD student. This is especially true in computer science where PhD supervisors cannot physically check every single line of code that a student writes, yet experimental validity of hinges on code correctness

Is that a password on a post-it there?

Yes, but this same machine is also driving down the value of bullshit review articles to zero---where it should've been all along. In time it will likewise crater the value of papers that have no accompanying artifact aka reproduction package. 1/2

Had my own “invisible gorilla” moment last night at the Oasis show in Melbourne. I was shocked to read the news reports this morning that a fan launched a flare into the crowd: not one of my family of four noticed it. Even more shocked to find it plain as day in the video my 11yo captured.

Canberra folks, is the same true your way?

Thanks to the RAID’25 organisers, who invited me to speak. I had a wonderful time talking about our recent work on an alternative method for verified robustness for neural networks. (see verse.systems/blog/post/20...) I couldn’t resist educating the younguns on “agents”

Program verification methods aim to be scalable (able to reason about large programs), automatic (require little human input), and precise (reason about complex properties). Yet no method does all three. In fact, they form a "trilemma". See this very short post: verse.systems/blog/post/20...

For anyone playing at home, in its 2008 invasion of Georgia, the Russian army used the Roki Tunnel (that links the two countries) as a key supply route. Georgia has also alleged that Russia used the tunnel to pre-position soldiers in Georgia ahead of the invasion.

Not contradicting you, but I’ve found LLMs to be a productive tool for learning intro level content in topics outside my expertise. Unlike a textbook I can say “tell me that another way”, “break that down for me”, or “isn’t there a connection between X and Y?”.

I wonderful reminder that “trivial” need not mean “worthless”.

Computing @ Imperial are hiring four Ass. / Assoc. Profs! Priority areas: - PL - Systems - Security - Software Eng. - Computer Architecture - Theoretical Computer Science Applications from individuals from underrepresented groups especially welcome! www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

If you build it, they will come. www.bbc.com/news/article...

You are an Early Career Researcher in #cybersec? Here is an opportunity: The AEC chairs of @USENIXSecurity '26 are looking for (self)nominations for the Artifact Evaluation Committee. Deadline: October 17th, 2025, so sign up soon! @chwress.bsky.social, @kumarde.bsky.social, @aurore-fass.bsky.social

there's still great websites on the internet rouses.net

It never fails to amaze and frustrate when it’s the companies pushing security products that fail the most basic tests of secure product development

The latest chapter in the ANOM story, in which the FBI and AFP deployed a fake secure phone system to spy on organised crime. The Australian High Court has unanimously ruled the operation legal and data collected can be used as evidence in prosecutions www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10...

This is a feature, not a bug. Rare events are, by definition, more informative than common ones.

The deadline for my postdoc on scalable clinical decision support is closing in 1 week: 4 October (Australian Eastern standard Time). Please share with anyone that you think would be interested