to add: The west is going to burn, fire has been here longer than the USA has, many Indigenous land management practices work alongside fire. Rather than focusing on who started a fire, we need to work out how to live with fire and how the city became a tinderbox and how to help people right now.

James Stout@jamesstout.bsky.social · 2d ago

Just wanna caution everyone posting about the Spokane fires that an arrest is not a conviction and if we look at LA they haven’t been able to convict that guy.

extreme income inequality is bad for a lot of reasons but today the one i'm mad at is people having the wealth and power to force me to live inside their delusions

I address the fallacies of this analogy here. Hope it helps! sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...

"The Printing Press Democratized Knowledge": When Slogans Masquerade as History — Sonja Drimmer

The phrase is said so frequently it seems, like the mechanism it celebrates, to mechanically replicate itself.  It's become a favorite catchphrase among tech boosters of any sort (see my post on...

sonjadrimmer.com

Wittgenstein would love this game en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Libs

Mad Libs - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I spent about four straight months in my apartment on Roosevelt Island. We had an incredible skyline view of Manhattan, including of the Weill Cornell Medical Center on 68th. Over the course of those four months, the hospital had replaced around 90 windows with negative pressure windows.

Gabriel Bosslet@gbosslet.bsky.social · 3d ago

RFK Jr said these words today on national television "There were ICUs that were empty all over the country including in New York at the height (of the pandemic)" hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha You are a fucking idiot hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha <sobs silently>

Great piece on what “co-” (copilot, co-author, etc) does for situating the relationship to LLMs. One thing to add: “co-“ allows just enough of the user to absorb accountability for what the model does wrong or badly, while asserting nonetheless that the model is just as capable as a person.

Brigitte Nerlich@bnerlich.bsky.social · 4d ago

I wrote this before the current AI going rogue kerfuffle but it relates to it - deals with the seductive prefix co- in AI speak: theconversation.com/why-the-ai-i... #AI #AIMetaphorObservatory #metaphor

It’s not becoming a little guy but it is become a weird language calculator and we’d be better off if we dropped the “little dude’s arriving soon” shit & think about wtf a language calculator is instead

It’s important to understand “age verification” and “kick the kids off social media” laws as a gift to Big Tech. These policies allow surveillance capitalism to chug along full steam ahead and let Silicon Valley giants off the hook. Instead of regulating their biz model, we just put up age gates

your apartment, the sport of basketball, and the Republic of Korea are all social constructs. mere recognition of this fact does not actually make the question of whether you are standing in your own apartment, playing basketball, or a Korean national up in the air until settled by op ed editors

This is more than the NSF social sciences division - now on the chopping block - awarded in grants last year. Think about that: a single AI company has the money to fund more social science research than the US govt.

Hetan Shah@hetanshah.bsky.social · 5d ago

Anthropic AI research fund offers $5m - $30m for social science research on themes of AI impact on workers; transition initiatives; income support; building worker stakes; and wider evidence on public investments. Total fund of $200m available www.anthropic.com/news/economi...

Which is interesting, if you want to read the tea leaves: Anthropic is fine with you attributing agency to what it wants you to believe are its conscientious little guys, but are careful to quarantine those little guys from any tainted association with wrong-doing.

In the same way that if you have an improperly sealed ant farm then the ants getting out is not the ants exhibiting any kind of superintelligence

Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social · 6d ago

Really important to note that in no way shape or form did Anthropic’s models in this incident “escape containment,” and not just in the word-policing sort of way. The model stumbled through an open, misconfigured gap. From Anthropic’s incident report:

AYFKM “Meta will be able to draw upon Newsmax's significant current reporting as well as archived content to support AI queries across Meta's apps and devices.” ir.newsmax.com/news/news-de...

Is anyone studying the "cognitive load" of reading LLM-generated text? The extra interpretative labor that presenting such text asks of us?

I don’t understand why they aren’t? What’s the incentive?

Maybe we should be holding HuggingFace responsible for not suing the shit out of OpenAI.

suhr@suhr.bsky.social · last wk.

See, the real creation of a "rogue AI" already happened. It happened as soon as people anticipated its existence, which was long ago. First in allegories, then in people who crave to be a subject of of some mystical force they refuse to understand. These technologies aren't wild animals.

Control theory is something circuit designers had to work on for a long time because, guess, what, we worked on creating STABLE systems. We never called the resulting instability "rogue systems" or whatever else is en vogue during IPO times.

See, the real creation of a "rogue AI" already happened. It happened as soon as people anticipated its existence, which was long ago. First in allegories, then in people who crave to be a subject of of some mystical force they refuse to understand. These technologies aren't wild animals.

Or if they have a good policy, what controls were violated? IMO this incident says little about the AI, which really just did what it was instructed, and a lot avoit the governance and competence of the operators. So that’s why I’m worried, and I think others should be too.

I guess my point was opaque, so let me be more clear: the point of forcing big platforms to become interoperable is to break their monopoly over (almost) everyone's social connections so that this doesn't rest on some kind of mass awakening or whatever.

Quarantegan@quarantegan.bsky.social · 2w ago

"Pulling our info ecosystem out of its death spiral" is an undertaking that would require 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙮𝙤𝙣𝙚 be willing to (1) participate, (2) suck up & deal with the headaches inherent to learning a new platform, & (3) stick with it. The Fediverse exists; this has already been doable for awhile. Good luck.

cook your brown rice in coconut milk.

It really sucks to be seeing history repeating itself again. A reactionary wave to the civil rights movements destroying an entire generations access to medical care that takes decades to undo.

no wonder Elon and his ilk hate academia, for all our sins, peer review exists, and if we were this wrong so often, there might just be a few consequences at least?* *not always, but I can't imagine getting away with being this wrong and this loud about it this often in any other industry

TechCrunch@techcrunch.com · 2w ago

Elon Musk's tunneling startup is reportedly in talks for a major new funding round.

Now that the rich and powerful people are calling for open-weights models, it's time to pressure them to be legitimately brave and back open-corpus models.

Marco Z@ocramz.bsky.social · 2w ago

jensen one of us, let's bring him over on bsky xcancel.com/i/status/208...

I'm somehow reviewing the "neuroscience and cognitive science" track at NeurIPS and it's incredible what bullshit AI/ML researchers can come up with when they read Wikipedia articles about the (still mostly-shaky) foundations provided by psychologists

Editors’ Choice: The Archive is Not a Toy: The Hidden Problems of a ‘Vintage’ AI

The Archive is Not a Toy: The Hidden Problems of a ‘Vintage’ AI

talkie’s poor representation of history is a side effect of a larger problem. The model was conceptually built as an experimental tool to see if language models can accurately predict the future, a…

activehistory.ca

For posterity, from the NYTimes. Complete displacement of accountability.

Broadband internet access decreased rural teen birth rates.

6:59am. Staring my alarm clock straight in the face. Asking out loud: “If you are conscious, say beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.” . . .

Andrea Lathrop@cabernet.bsky.social · 2w ago

You cannot determine whether an LLM is 'conscious' by asking it. You. Cannot.