My dog loves absolutely everyone, and everyone adores her. She instantly adapts and thrives in every environment, bonding confidently with every dog and person. She does not know the thing called social anxiety. I love her desperately. But if she were my child I’d think she was a changeling

Me to Anthropic

I generally admire Ronan Farrow’s reporting, but I’m not sure I read anything in the Altman piece that wasn’t just more confirmation of Karen Hao’s in-depth analysis in Empire of AI, i.e., ‘Everyone he knows says he’s a lying prick who will say/do literally anything for power’ Did I miss the reveal?

I am aging in fucking dog years because of this lunatic.

Movie ages better every day

This isn’t a lamentable side effect of these products. It’s the actual reason they exist.

They killed nearly 200 children on the first day of this war and no one of authority suffered a single consequence. That’s how we got here.

Important 🧵 Science is a natural political target of all authoritarians. Telling scientists to be quietly apolitical is asking them to passively accept science’s demolition (now happening at pace in the US, with great losses everywhere else). This doesn’t earn trust. It displays indifference.

"I was tired of having to put my pronouns in emails!!!"

Armageddon is terrible, but our only other option was diversity trainings at work.

Twice Americans chose a madman over a competent, qualified woman and we all knew it might just be the thing that ends us

Can we also talk about how messed up this image is? What is this supposed to represent

Very glad to share the news that I’ve been elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh; it’s a remarkable honour to be part of its long history. Congrats to everyone in this year’s cohort of Fellows! Nice to see some friends in there too.

Meth, measles and black mold can also spread rapidly in schools. This means they must be important for educators to integrate in the classroom! That’s just logic, which Randi has definitely mastered.

The reason Moby Dick is the most American novel ever written is because it is about a violent white man enacting a confusing revenge fantasy against a cheap source of oil.

Reading this remarkable book by @michelamassimi.bsky.social Only just realising what a big deal it is: novel and profoundly erudite accounts of perspective, phenomena, models... All 👌 Plus the style manages to balance gutsy and respectful to predecessors (something I often mess up). Go read it

I don’t know how I missed the fact that in 2002 we apparently decided we are not, in fact doing international law anymore

this isn’t stupid. It’s another nail in the coffin being built for democracy

Also, any TV show about academia/university with an academic in the room. Just…where does their information come from

Did anyone ask him whether he is aware that this would earn him permanent retirement via the Hague, or are we just not doing international law anymore

One of the best jobs in UK social science, research & policy.

[The Apollo 11 plaque] reads: "We came in peace for all Mankind." As the United States was dropping 7 ½ megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock. - Carl Sagan

oof

This week, Brexit finally killed our family business. We cleared out our warehouse, handed back the keys, paid the final bills and said goodbye to our last employee. What was once a thriving firm died a slow, sad death, all thanks to Farage, Johnson and the gullible idiots they conned. 1/18

Just learned that apparently Artemis 2's Victor Glover listens to the Gil Scott Heron song poem "Whitey on the Moon" every Monday and now I'm thinking about reposting my thread it, from like, five years ago, back when the conversation was about Mars.

Every single person who allows this late-stage dementia-addled man to continue in office for a single additional minute belongs in The Hague.

I got sent this yesterday and I’m still laughing today. It’s so stupid but also perfection

I used to write the WaPo editorials on US-Africa policy, as well on as human rights and politics on the continent. To describe hundreds of thousands of deaths on the continent as “messy” is an absolute abomination.

The @washingtonpost.com describes the deaths of an estimated 750,000 people to date as "messy"

Voting in my first Scottish Parliamentary election on 7 May and I still have no idea what a list seat is or how it differs from a constituency seat but I think a month is prob enough time to figure it out

"We're in the Economist?"

Elgol, Isle of Skye #Scotland #IsleofSkye #Highlands www.damianshields.com

What if social media platforms had an HOA? The mastodon experience (I ran a small instance for a while)

My last viral tweet was "When someone explains how Mastodon works" accompanied by this video:

All of this. Showing how models can *perform* interiority via mech interp tools is a very,very long way from being able to claim they have phenomenal experience. Particularly when purely mechanical explanations (training data) so far suffice.

How families are fighting to survive Trump’s war on transgender kids.

"Cognitive Surrender" trial: "Overall, across 1,372 participants and over 9,500 individual trials, the researchers found subjects were willing to accept faulty AI reasoning a whopping 73.2 percent of the time, while only overruling it 19.7 percent of the time." arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/r...

About to board my last flight from JFK to Edinburgh in this 36-hour flight hell saga from Santa Fe and I’m going on only 3.4 hours of sleep and two airport Vespers so this will be my last post of the day

The @nytimes.com has allowed its standards to sink so low that now people can't even tell when it embarks on genuine critical satire. Not the fault of readers! People make reasonable inferences from recent experience. The editors could just choose to reliably serve us journalism again, at any time!

For some reason I can't enjoy podcasts the way it seems most people do, but I am definitely going to try again now

OH HELL YES

OH MY GOD

Yeah I'm not avoiding Bluesky specifically. When I can't do anything better (in a noisy airport where I can't read or write good!) I'm on it endlessly. But my sanity requires that under any other conditions I am petting dogs, walking under trees, reading a book, cooking food, or phoning a friend

Anthropic every damn day

OK folks this reads to me like a stacked pile of nothing put in a box labeled 'wow, so interesting!' and if there is something anyone thinks I am missing (I'm talking to you, bluesky-doesn't-get-AI guys) I would like to know what it is. Here's how I read it: 1/n www.anthropic.com/research/emo...

The horse op-ed is an instant classic. I can't tell you how much joy this piece gives me. It should be taught in every introductory writing class in no small part because the horse arguments are so compelling. "I have noticed that human children get to eat cake. But I am bigger than the children."

What are you talking about? There's nothing wrong with AI fact-checking!

being able to sit patiently with other people's thoughts, sit patiently with your own, and make both of those processes legible to someone who is not you is very valuable. if you can find a new way to do this that is fantastic news but I suspect it will at least resemble the model we've inherited

This is so, so well-articulated.

I wonder if any civilization in the galaxy or even the universe has fumbled a stunningly perfect, gorgeous planet as hard as humanity. We'll never know.