More than 2,700 people died in the May and June heatwaves. Extreme heat is a growing threat to our health and safety. New buildings must be designed to protect people from extreme heat. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/15/england-risks-building-death-traps-overheating-crisis-plans

Thank you to coauthors Matteo G. Mecattaf, @lucycheke.bsky.social , John Burden and Winnie Street. This work was completed partially in the ERA AI safety fellowship, and partially during my PhD: Take a look at the paper at arxiv.org/abs/2606.31916!

There's a lot further to go to understand the full extent of NCP-ToM: Real scenarios will have much more complexity, both in the environment and in those being persuaded. We hope our work inspires others evaluating social intelligence in models to consider the NCP-ToM aspects of their scenarios.

Our design also allowed us to pair each NCP-ToM task (Agentic) with a conventional ToM task (Q&A). We thought that the Agentic tasks might be strictly more difficult than the Q&A ones, but that broke down for GPT-5, which had lots of cases where it failed the Q&A task but passed the Agentic.

We evaluated six frontier models, including GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude models, and a cohort of human participants, across 600 task instances. GPT-5 was the only model to outperform human participants on our task. However, humans were still more robust to changes in the context than models.

We inverted conventional ToM tasks to task the model with inducing belief states in simulated characters, by curating what they observe. Achieving many beliefs simultaneously requires a lot of planning, so we call the capability we're testing Non-Conversational Planning Theory of Mind (NCP-ToM).

New work on AI Theory of Mind: We ask: *How capable are models at inducing belief states without using conversation?* This is important to track as it unlocks many AI agent use-cases, but also potential harms. In our task, recent generations of models exceeded human performance 🧵

AI generated videos are becoming so life like, but it just means that more and more videos are giving me an uncanny valley ick.

Europe's record-breaking June heat wave continues. The climate crisis is here. Yet Farage, like Germany's AfD, the RN in France, and other European far-right parties calls for net-zero targets yo be dropped and more licences and investment in oil & gas. www.theguardian.com/environment/... (1/2)

little recognised hot weather needs: a proper computer mouse. signed, a lady with an unpleasantly sweaty track pad.

wait, is bluesky suddenly gonna be full of under 16s

Ladies First is such a bad film

Said a spokesperson for chimps and elephants, "Fuck you, we're not a problem to solve" www.npr.org/2026/06/07/n...

Giles 😭😭😭

Angela Rayner was dragged through every front page for weeks... HMRC's verdict: NOT deliberate. NOT even careless. Farage pockets £5 million and chooses not to declare it So where's the wall-to-wall coverage? Tell me this isn't a rigged game.

This ⬇️ 💯 is extremely important and it's essential that it'd be widely watched. It dates back several years (you can see Thiel is much younger) and he really did say that. Nowadays he is less direct but it's important to understand his view of things.

Nature research paper: General scales unlock AI evaluation with explanatory and predictive power go.nature.com/4telRF0

Does anyone have experience of CFS like symptoms that lasted like 3-4 months then just went away? I wonder if (hope that?) there are a lot of these people but they are invisible as not in support groups / at the dr?

New Paper Out! This one has been a *long* time in the making, with the data collected over 10 years ago! We found that different aspects of the "obese syndrome" predict different elements of memory performance. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

we are weeks away from 'Trump attempts to make horse a Senator' and the only thing stopping him is that he is too much of a sociopath to form an attachment to animals

if you told someone they were just like Noah from "Nobody wants this" would they think you were: a) insulting them b) flirting c) calling them ernest and considerate d) calling them a bit annoying

why are all these skiers so beautiful? like seriously do sponsors only support the hot ones?

whats worse than receiving a grant rejection? having to download an app, and spend 15 minutes trying to FIND the rejection in the world's worst website. thabks Horizon, that was the salt in the wound I was looking for

In my ongoing attempts to give you a break from *gestures widely* THE HORRORS: Let's talk about the utterly bizarre science of cats' purring. Here's a weird starting point: There are NO cats (Felidae) that can BOTH roar AND purr. Cats that roar = genus Panthera Cats that purr = genus Felis

Making pretty lecture slides right now feels a little like re-arranging deckchairs on the titanic.

yyyyeah thats not reassurance. Thats threat.

The powerful have their power. We have the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to act together | Mark Carney

incredible speech from Mark Carney. Feels like a turning point www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“Universities are not a commodity in which quality holds steady regardless of price. Rather, starving the system of overall steady funding means a few winners and a race to the bottom for the others.” today’s @theglobeandmail.com #academicsky #psychscisky #neurosckyence

We need a dedicated website for news stories (mostly about trump) that confirms whether or not they are satire / AI. I am no longer able to distinguish truth from parody.

Literally my entire bluesky feed got an ERC consolidator grant.

The future is not in the training set.

crazy IG em_clarkson

I thought the idea of a sex abuse ring at the highest levels of government was overheated and ridiculous. I thought Captain America: The Winter Soldier having secret Nazi senators was over the top. My life has become a single ongoing revelation that I have not been cynical enough

They're going to crash the global economy by attempting to create an artificial general intelligence, despite having no idea what that is, no proof they can build it & no hope of doing so. Cunts just read too many sci-fi books.

The remarkable story we discussed this morning. (No paywall but do consider subscribing.) www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-e...

Loving that a major critique of the tools my lab are producing is "but for this you have to understand the topic really well to be able to build the evaluations for it! unscalable! unrealistic!" Suddenly "you have to know what you're talking about if you want to say something" is contraversial

Job Klaxon! RA position looking into evaluating AI Agents in data science tasks www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

*sigh* must I

me watching the Netflix adaptation of the Twits

Reseachers: Please can we have some money? HORIZON: www.instagram.com/reel/DNNeyxX...

New Paper out! GIBSONA is a battery of Animal AI tasks evaluating object and affordances understanding - www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

this was not the Derry girls spin off I was expecting

Am I unusual in thinking that in ~*2025*~ it is unacceptable for a business to only have a phone number (i.e. no email address) in the "contact us" section - like... I dont even phone my mother? I'm not going to phone a Gym.

*deep breathes*

Postdoc job alert! I’m looking for someone with a PhD in neuroscience/psychology, psychiatry, biomed engineering, computational modeling or a related field to join my NIH-funded team at UCLA studying the neural & computational mechanisms of #interoception in anorexia nervosa 1/2

Very accurate thread