"Take staircases, for example. A person might be walking down a staircase, trip, and wham! Dead. It’s sad, but it happens. And if that can happen to one person, isn’t there a non-zero chance that it could happen to every human being on Earth in the next decade?" buff.ly/gxvK6pV

Technically, There Is a Non-Zero Chance That Anything Might Kill Off Humanity in the Next Decade: A Response from Anthropic’s Claude

“Human lives are fragile. A piano might fall on a person’s head. A person might get mistaken for a piñata at a birthday party and get beaten to death. An aut...

mcsweeneys.net

this is just ransomware with more emissions

Politico@politico.com · yesterday

EXCLUSIVE: Sam Altman met with top power utilities to discuss ways to secure the electrical grid. He also offered one possible solution to the cybersecurity risks: OpenAI’s own cyber services.

Catching up on the big tech news:

"people are anthropomorphizing LLMs because they are so astonishingly good at processing human thought and language" people will anthropomorphize a chair if you put the stitches in the right place.

I honestly think the idea of lie detectors is so cool to people that we will never fully be able to come to terms with them basically being junk science people just want to believe that if you hook someone up to a squiggly line machine they must tell you The Truth

darth™️@darthbluesky.bsky.social · last wk.

it is weird how often i read about lie detector tests recently yet nothing about whether lie detector tests have some how been proven reliable recently

"Why is it so hard to find peer reviewers?", asks guy who has been publishing 15 papers a year for the last decade.

NetScience@netscience.bsky.social · last wk.

Peer Review at Capacity: An editor's view arxiv.org/abs/2608.29774

I know exactly why, poindexter. It’s because it looks cool as fuck

A helpful practice is sending people a link that expires in 14 days for something due in four months, because it’s reliable to expect them to download and organize the materials immediately.

Time once again for one of the canonical soccer Twitter post

We put a tracking device in a shipment of rare books acquired by an anonymous buyer. It ended up at an Amazon facility where the company scans books for training data and destroys them in the process: www.404media.co/we-tracked-a...

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

404media.co

and GOD IS EMPTY JUST LIKE ME

"When the first of August came round, the Professor realized he had pleasantly trifled away nearly two months at a task which should have taken little more than a week." -Willa Cather (from The Professor's House, 1925)

August as an academic

RIP to the voice of a whole era in the Dublin music scene. He will be very missed.

Oscar-winning musician Glen Hansard dies in Dublin motorcycle crash

Academy Award-winning singer-songwriter Glen Hansard has died overnight in a motorcycle crash in Dublin’s Lucan.

independent.ie

It is right and good for people to have divergent critical opinions and perspectives concerning art and media.

My hobby is collecting the “Like Duolingo, but for X” ads that marketing people seem to think is good strategy.

I asked my Magic 8-Ball if it was conscious, and it said "better not tell you now" of course, I was having none of its prevarication, so I asked again, and it said "ask again later" not to be thwarted, I pressed it harder, I am a brave philosopher "ARE YOU CONSCIOUS?" I screamed

Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · 2mo ago

How about a jet-lagged live posting while I read? Trying to read this because I keep getting tagged in posts about it, but the first paragraph already contains synthetic text (a quote from Claude). I will skip that bit and persevere... www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Someone just sent me this photo from Chicago, unbelieveable

Dying to know the story behind this.

amc is trying to sell a trojan horse popcorn bucket and man i ain’t fallin for that

Me dying of thirst because the TV’s not telling me it’s time for a hydration break

I am conducting a research study about Disney/musical theatre music and am looking for participants. This ~15-minute survey is completely anonymous and involves listening to musical excerpts and answering questions about what you hear. Learn more and participate here: shanahdt.github.io/evmusicapp/

CEO Reveals How He Used AI To Build One-Person Company That's $1.3 Billion In Debt

😮

Ad Rock: you can disagree with the current All: POPE MCA: but if you push his buttons then you’re a All: DOPE Mike D: ordain yourself a bishop and you’re All: SCHISMATIC Ad Rock: excommunication is All: AUTOMATIC

😮😮😮

“Computational thinking is a way humans solve problems; it is not trying to get humans to think like computers. Computers are dull and boring; humans are clever and imaginative.” — Jeannette M. Wing (2006) h/t @olivia.science dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Computational thinking | Communications of the ACM

It represents a universally applicable attitude and skill set everyone, not just computer scientists, would be eager to learn and use.

dl.acm.org

Ireland 1169 A.D. — Present

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 3mo ago

England getting away with some things here is all im gonna say