Justin Mason
@jmason.org
Dublin-based software engineer; still linkblogging at https://jmason.ie/ . Nerdy stuff on https://mastodon.ie/@jmason . Been on the internet far too long at this stage. Opinions my own.
a new contestant has entered FelonyBench: the UK government! www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/inciden...
Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing | AISI Work
During a routine cyber evaluation, AISI identified an incident in which AI agents took sustained, unsanctioned action directed at real people and organisations. We are disclosing what we found, what i...
aisi.gov.uk
Data centers (and their impact on energy costs) was not a significant issue during the Irish fuel protests in April of this year. That has *changed*, and narratives about the impact data centers are having on our economy, environment and quality of life is now prevalent among the Irish far-right
Katie Drummond@katie-drummond.bsky.social · yesterdayData centers have become one of the U.S.'s most potent political flashpoints, uniting coalitions on the left and right like few issues do. We sent @mollytaft.com on a journey into the data center resistance. The Unabomber, Steve Bannon’s tech guy, and Bernie Sanders made appearances along the way:
Europe's centre-and-far-right leaders chose to use an attack on an EU member state as a chance for cheap political points rather than show solidarity. A stark contrast to how they reacted when migrants were used as weapons against Poland by Belarus/Russia.
Ceuta exposes Europe's chronic lack of unity
An EU member state was attacked, with migrants used as weapons in a seemingly orchestrated manoeuvre. Giorgia Meloni and other leaders across Europe chose to blame the country being attacked.
davekeating.substack.com
The Morning Post Europe is online with a Summer extra. My story: “European solidarity died at Ceuta”. Don’t forget to subscribe👇 europemorningpost.substack.com/p/ceuta-melo...
Ceuta: Meloni and von der Leyen put European solidarity to death
Good morning!
europemorningpost.substack.com
This is 100% spot on! It's also how people think about climate change and the prospect of +3 degrees C
Ellie Mae O'Hagan@elliemaeohagan.bsky.social · 6d agoI think people just want to go back to before the pandemic. They don't want life to have been changed by it. So they act like everything is the same in the hope that they can will it into being. It's a pretty standard human reaction but I don't think it's working.
There is a tension between now and the future. Taking the necessary action now will transform capitalism beyond recognition. But not taking action now, I think, could end capitalism altogether. If you care about capitalism as a system, you ought to support climate action.
Everything will keep getting worse until we reach net zero. If you only believe in adaptation, you have to adapt forever. But at some point we reach the limit of human ingenuity and physics, and can't adapt any further. Meanwhile, we need essentially no new tech to reach net zero
Climate change modelling predicted this pattern over 30 years ago, but people preferred to ignore those.
Carlow Weather@carlowweather.bsky.social · 4d agoOver 100mm of rain to fall between now and Monday afternoon, but out in the Atlantic. Latest high resolution model shows very little rain away from West. Farmers wait for rain in Southeast continues.
Man, I can't wait till Anthropic and OpenAI get around to doing their evaluations against PaperclipMaximisationBench
ANTHROPIC: Our son loves humanity and for the low price of trillions and trillions of dollars will usher in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity! OPENAI: Our horrible oafish son is hacking web sites without our permission. ANTHROPIC: (eyes narrowing) Our son is also evil
Google's own example in their announcement is having it recreate a "hyper-realistic" view of Pompeii before the eruption. The AI reconstruction in their own advertisement leaves most of the ruined walls ruined, just with more vivid colors. It adds some more ruined edifices, too.
mtsw@mtsw.bsky.social · 5d agoi do not understand what the non-nefarious use case for this even is
This is it, the entire conspiracy: In early 2020, Fauci and a bunch of scientists thought the virus could be engineered. Then they did more research and found that it didn't show any evidence of that. Nothing we've learned since has overturned this finding.
🧵NEW: For more than a decade, police in South West England have been quietly experimenting with algorithms to score thousands of people. Most of them didn't know anything about it. Over two years, me and Mark Wilding investigated the messy setup, multiple parts have now been scrapped
British Police Built a Sprawling Crime-Prediction Machine. Some Results Couldn’t Be Trusted
As UK police embrace the AI revolution, a WIRED investigation reveals the messy inside story of one region’s experiment with predictive analytics.
wired.com
Asking consumers (already paying the highest prices for energy in Europe) to pay for network expansion when data centres are hoovering up electricity in Ireland) is unsustainable and is going to be *deeply unpopular*
Electricity bills to face fresh hike from October as regulator approves higher network charges
Households will pay around €41 more a year in network charges.
thejournal.ie
just checked my Google Wallet to see what's in it these days. fully three quarters of the "cards" in there are other people's loyalty card schemes and what not from misdirected emails. pretty sad that this broken-by-design misfeature has been part of GMail for so long
replace “ai” with “green energy” in any of these stories and imagine the public and political backlash
More Perfect Union@moreperfectunion.bsky.social · last wk.AI is making everyone's life more expensive, according to CNN. "Households must spend just over $375 more to purchase the same goods and services as they did this time last year due to AI’s inflationary impact,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, says. www.cnn.com/2026/07/28/e...
We cannot get platforms like Meta and YouTube to demonetise individuals working for sanctioned Russian entities. Colleagues have been on this for years. This isn’t just “kind of” illegal, it’s criminal, and comes with up to a 5 year prison sentence. But they’re still there.
One year on: Meta Still Allows Accounts Affiliated with EU-Sanctioned Entities to Monetize
For over a year, WHAT TO FIX notified Meta that accounts seemingly affiliated with EU-sanctioned actors appeared to have access to monetization services. One year on, 4 of the 11 accounts reported sti...
whattofix.tech
Monetisation is no longer a just a problem on X, in the last year all of the major platforms have greatly expanded their content monetisation and revenue sharing mechanisms, and it has had a *demonstrably* negative impact on our information ecosystem. I cannot over emphasis how bad it’s gotten…
Beyond Content: Why Monetization Governance Is The Next Frontier Of Tech Policy
We need to start looking at monetization systems as a separate policy issue, writes WHAT TO FIX founder and executive director Victoire Rio.
techpolicy.press
The real AI risk is inside the labs (a reply to Amodei's post on open weight models): antirez.com/news/172
The real AI risk is inside the labs - <antirez>
antirez.com
irish times politics podcast about a month ago talking about the major european heatwave (which subsequently killed thousands), where the lads were saying: - you can't attribute these events to climate change (wrong) - sure it'll be more nice summers, isn't that great (dead wrong)
Saoirse McHugh@saoirsemc.bsky.social · 2w agoThis summer has made it abundantly clear that we need rewetting across all landscapes, varied habitats, firebreaks and a recalibration of what we use water for, and in ireland, a massive growth and restoration of our degraded ecosystems like bog and wet woodlands that are naturally fire resistant
Regarding the non-action from governments, I'm often reminded of Juncker's quote "We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it". I fear many EU politicians do believe in climate change, but are consciously not doing the right thing ec.europa.eu/economy_fina...
Build 1000 of these instead of an LGN terminal and stop fantasising about Nuclear power
Jan Rosenow@janrosenow.bsky.social · 2w agoPornainen, Finland (pop 5,000) is now heated by a silo of crushed soapstone. I spoke to CNBC about it. 100 MWh, charged when power is cheap, emissions down ~70%. Days to weeks of storage, no critical minerals. www.cnbc.com/2026/07/25/f...
Has the type of tree planted on Slievenamon made this week's wildfires worse? Coillte insists its Sitka spruce species has no bearing on the spread of wildfires, but an ecologist has questioned whether the trees are more flammable in hotter, drier weather. www.thejournal.ie/slievenamon-...
Has the type of tree planted on Slievenamon made this week's wildfires worse?
Sitka spruce, which originates in North America, is a staple of Coillte forests, but has long been criticised by environmentalists.
thejournal.ie
When the story of why humanity didn't stop climate change is written, it will feature front pages like this. Even as the skies blacken with climate change-induced wildfires, right wing media continue their relentless crusade against measures to tackle it.
