Dan Brickley
@danbri.bsky.social
data standards technologist. w3c, schema.org etc.
I wrote up a new post about what AI software finding might mean for the backdoor debate. blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/08/14/e...
Everything is about to “go dark”
I’m coming down from spending a few days at Usenix Security, right here in my hometown of Baltimore. This means that my days have been taken up with two kinds of conversation: first, explaini…
blog.cryptographyengineering.com
So many of the norms underlying academic culture relied on frictions associated with writing. It was entirely predictable that academia would be profoundly harmed when a machine came along to remove those frictions by making (insincere, inaccurate) communication effortless.
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2mo ago1. Recently I’ve received lots of emails from people I don’t know personally, asking for my feedback on their books or papers. They explain the connection between my work and theirs and ask me to take a look. The catch, of course, is that the emails are transparently, obviously, written by AI.
AI agents are checking the scientific literature — and spotting decades-old errors www.nature.com/articles/d4158… #AI #FactChecking
David Miliband says 75th anniversary of refugee convention should be about defending core principles & fixing what does not work in practice "We’ve seen what works: giving refugees legal certainty, investing early in integration, and sharing responsibility fairly" www.aol.com/articles/dav...
David Miliband’s charity: Don’t give up on refugees to chase votes - AOL
Governments must not weaken their commitments to refugees to chase votes, David Miliband’s charity has said.
aol.com
now working in glorious WebGL !! added the morph target and wasted a lot of time trying to *ahem* _improve_ the avatar generation ; I noticed the tooth & back were poorly reconstructed so my idea was to synthesize and use multiple views to inject them at fitting time, not my finest idea
Posts claiming that Tony Blair’s son’s company is being paid £100bn to develop digital IDs are going viral again. But as we’ve explained before, there’s no truth to this. And plans for new digital ID mandatory for Right to Work checks have been abandoned. fullfact.org/politics/ton...
Tony Blair’s son does not run a company being paid £100 billion to develop digital ID – Full Fact
A false claim that Euan Blair’s company has been contracted to develop and monitor digital IDs is recirculating online.
fullfact.org
This week's net.wars, "Turn left at the robot", goes to the Human-Robot Interaction conference and finds that in robots versus kids the kids win every time: netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/03/20/t...,
Turn left at the robot
It's easy to forget, now that so many computer interfaces seem to be getting more inscrutable, that in the early 1990s the shift from the command line to graphi
netwars.pelicancrossing.net
Under the hood, we are using IETF Internet Messaging specifications commonly tagged as "email". Sounds old, right? Actually there is a lot of new stuff going on! For example, #chatmail apps now fully support: - RFC9788 ("Header Protection") to achieve minimal metadata - RFC9580 ("OpenPGP") to […]
Original post on chaos.social
chaos.social
Language identification still proves to be a challenging task, especially for web data. In collaboration with @mlcommons.org @eleutherai.bsky.social @jhu.edu and 97 community members, we created CommonLID, a new benchmark for LangID for 100+ languages!
Meta's plan for launching glasses that people can use to secretly identify strangers on the street is to do it "during a dynamic political environment" when people who care about why that's bad are "focused on other concerns." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...
Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition Technology to Its Smart Glasses
nytimes.com
We've extended submissions for our #CHI2026 workshop on Developing Standards and Documentation For LLM Use as Simulated Research Participants. Submit a short position paper by Feb 20th and let's think through some thorny issues together! sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.e...
CHI'26 Workshop on Developing Standards and Documentation For LLM Use as Simulated Research Participants
Workshop Motivation
sites.google.com
I was shocked to learn 80% of our neurons are in the cerebellum—that little bit of hindbrain—vs ~20% in the big fancy neocortex. (Like learning ~55% of our cells are non-human!) Evolved perhaps for motor control/coordination, the cerebellum became the controller for many abstract mental activities.
Song of the Cerebellum
Is thought just motion in the mind?
radiolab.org
Wowsers look at what happened to posts on Twitter/X about London crime after monetisation of posts was introduced… economist.com/britain/2026...
FOAF namespace server is back up at xmlns.com. Apologies for the downtime.
Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below! Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage
It's cool that Chrome's new renderer/rasterizer (Graphite) is using Dawn (Chrome's WebGPU implementation) as its GPU abstraction layer. "Dogfooding" it like this means they're going to be extra-serious about perf/features/etc. blog.chromium.org/2025/07/intr...
Well, it’s the day after Wallace and Gromit rode again – and it’s the 31st anniversary of the first appearance of the greatest sound effect in the history of the motion picture, so here’s the story of how (I found out how) they made it...
My colleague Sanjay Ghemawat & I have done a fair bit of performance tuning of various pieces of code. We wrote an internal Performance Hints document ~2 years ago as a way of identifying some general principles & we've recently published a version of it externally. Doc: abseil.io/fast/hints.h...
Loving this. "Antirender" engine converts architects presentation drawings into the likely reality of the designs :) antirender.com
I’m half Chinese, but the most tiresome type of person on here wants me to apologize to asians for calling an anti-toxicity feature “zen mode.”
The flute is older than the wheel. A flute fashioned from the bone of a vulture was discovered in a cave in Germany and thought to be 35,000 years old, making it tens of thousands of years older than the wheel. Don’t reinvent the woodwinds.
