Lots of people tried to reconstruct the ML/AI/stats community over here. 90% of them left because the random abuse they got for just posting ordinary research results was too much. bsky.app/profile/jwhe...

the reason people sometimes act madder at democrats than republicans when republicans do impossibly evil shit is the same reason why, if you hired an exterminator to handle a roach infestation and he showed up to feed and play with them instead, your first instinct wouldn’t be to yell at the roaches

UK Sensible Centrists in 2019: "It is the absolute duty of the Labour leader to condemn every single bad Facebook post." UK Sensible Centrists in 2026: "Not only is it very good the Labour leader isn't condemning flagrant breaches of international law it's also extremely smart."

grim posthumous scenario i had not previously considered: you post a picture of the missile headed straight for you, and are memorialized by a bunch of random assholes complaining about alt text

I’m going to call it. Today is the day we’ll look back on and say was the end of de facto US hegemony. The Trump regime have been dismantling US soft power, but this is full abdication in favour of Trump-Putin spheres of influence international relations as competing petrostates.

as i said they’re generally counting on indifference, and the ritualized killing of random fishermen for months leading up to it is probably what gave them notion they could

don’t do the “maduro is bad, but…” thing. the defensive crouch won’t help, it muddles the message, and the important thing is that this is immoral, illegal, and idiotic. the three Is

They *cannot hear* criticism, because it’s coming from people they regard as automatically inferior. They have spent exactly no seconds listening to criticism from anyone who isn’t a right wing crackpot, and heard not one of the words. When we speak, they hear a duck quacking, or a cow mooing.

I notice how - whether it’s war, austerity or this particular shitshow - nobody ever asks the people who correctly predicted they would be disastrous why they got it spot on, while the smart politics understanders repeatedly fucked it. Could this be because nobody wants to know the actual answers?

This, combined with "vice signaling" (taking pride in antisocial behavior) has given us the reign of the Stupid Asshole, something most people are against, but can only be remedied if we're not too polite to talk about it

Foreign Policy Analysis is low key the darkly funniest field ever now. Are we at war? Does the president himself know? Who are we at war with? Why? Something to do with drugs and/or oil? We’re either invading Venezuela, Nigeria, neither, or both.

google: we have invented agi but have hidden it in such an obscure website no one will ever find it anthropic: through our interpretability research, we discovered claude imagines himself wearing a bow tie at all times openai: we added slot machines

The MPs’ second jobs scandal is IMO the pick of the bunch here: literally just the lads realising they could consult the register of members’ interests then use CTRL+F in Hansard, suddenly discovering more ludicrous, overt corruption in one afternoon than they had over the previous eleven years.

this is a cycle i have observed with a lot of issues in the social media age, at least since i started paying attention to how debates worked ca. 2010-11

Boosting this, for those who have not seen it yet.

Finally got my second book published.

Y’all. It’s wrong to call someone the “c word.”

What many people fail to appreciate is that the key resource required by written exams is actually space to sit them in, and this goes double for supervised laptop use, and, at least in the UK, most universities no longer have the basic real estate to go back to total examination.

Heidegger-Arendt-Sartre-De Beauvoir nightmare polycule.

Weird, we smashed the control panel and jammed on the accelerator, and now we can’t turn the ship or slow down. What could possibly explain this.

A final thought: I think we shouldn't be surprised that you can't say anything mathematically substantive about how hard it is to emulate cognition without having a substantively mathematical characterisation of what cognition is.

carl linnaeus 🤝 people that obsessed over tieflings and druids

Who owns the future of artificial intelligence? Our video of the week argues that the true struggle is not just over technological prowess, but over the capture and organization of value across a multi-layered AI “stack.” Feat. @nsrnicek.bsky.social buff.ly/A0doDoI

I'm fascinated by uses and abuses of mathematical results in the AI culture war. Especially the opposition between No Free Lunch theorems and Solmonoff induction, but I've got a sideline in the Ingenia theorem and Smith and Landgrebe's complexity based arguments. Should maybe write a substack on it.

One of my professors in undergrad was a “cognitive scientist” who would insist he had proved P=NP because a certain minimal surfaces problem was NP-hard but you could use soap films to solve it in O(1). That represented a substantially more rigorous and defensible argument than whatever this is:

Always nice to be told to fuck off in not so many words.

I really wish people would stop sharing this purported result, because it really does not show what it’s authors claim it shows, and they are explicitly telling people it means they don’t have to pay attention to technical developments on that basis.

I’ve not talked about the LLM bubble on here yet, as mostly I discuss technical rather than economic issues, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. Especially while reading Carlota Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. Here are some thoughts.

The Anglosphere elite treats liberal democracy like a trust fund which they can borrow against indefinitely

Today on Centralisation Island, London delays tram between the UK's 5th and 15th biggest city that share a Mayor and an alleged transport authority. Not much authority eh? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Again, we are not "at risk" of creating a Trumpian politics in four or five years when Farage wins. Farage looks likely to win because everyone has spent the last decade - at least - creating the same reactionary, racist political system as Trump. It's already here.

the strongest form of omerta we have is the taboo on the media saying that the people who rule us are insane clowns who publicly dream of genocide

Are the lads going to candidly discuss how they helped to rehabilitate the politics of the National Front, because they thought the Sensible Centrists could harness and channel them? I would say: no, they will set everything on fire first.

Kinkshame, shame kink.

I do think a decent proportion of terrible current events are traceable to the fact that over the past few decades, pundits and politicians went online and got unfiltered pushback for the first time. This then caused them to double down over and over and echo chamber themselves into extremism

Political scandals in Britain are only ever scandals if key actors in politics and media agree they are scandalous, and collaborate on turning them into a rolling front page atrocity. If those people are instead deeply culpable, it is like nothing ever happened: a yawning, airless desert of silence.

The most inevitable obvious conclusion to the strategy of backing the evil of "intellectual property" and the mouse against the corporate AI giants. Shit was always just about negotiating terms of power consolidation.

Sure, we could *try* to fix the country’s multiple very serious overlapping problems but deviants walk amongst us, and they must first be harshly disciplined.

The Anglo-Saxon model

It's fine to push back against google-glasses or whatevs, but the day is going to come where we can easily record and share our memories, and a lot of anti-surveillance populism rn is laced with batshit anti-transhumanism that will outright try to *mandate* cognitive limitations in the next century.

This is another case of reactionary discourse dynamics encouraged by obligation/superogation collapse: if you can’t see that it might be *good* not to do something and yet *not bad* to do it, then you all too easily become invested in asserting its goodness in order to evade being judged bad.

One thing I think is probably true is a lot of people are very invested in Problematic Horny Fantasies being Morally and Politically Good Actually, but really they're probably neutral-to-a-little-bit-bad but we should all just be chill about it cos, you know, life is short.

The inevitable has happened. I've started a substack. The first post is now live, and its a longform review of Leif Weatherby's Language Machines that uses the opportunity to say some things about inferentialism, computation, and LLMs: deontologistics.substack.com/p/computatio...

it might seem surprising that the people who said “look, let trans people live their lives, but i have Reasonable Concerns about sports and toilets” aren’t up in arms about this, but what you have to remember is that those people who said that are liars who were lying

We occasionally get eruptions of deep concern about the public’s disillusionment with democracy and the question is always “which phone-based phenomenon is upsetting people this week” and not the rather more accurate and pertinent “What democracy?”.

Transphobes can afford to march across the country threatening to sue every institution they meet into submission. Parents of trans children daren't raise their heads for fear of a deluge of abuse and threats. Is this justice? Is this liberty?