paco xander nathan

Eliezer Yudkowsky and the Unabomber Have a Lot in Common (4,400 words)

New piece on the surprising similarities between Eliezer Yudkowsky and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. This might sound like hyperbole, but it's not. In my view, the Rationalist community is a ticking time bomb--it's only a matter of time before someone does something inexcusable.

A Philosopher Explains Quantum Computers Or, at least, tries their best to! (8,700 words)

New article on quantum computers!! Curious about what they are, how they work, and what they might be good for? I cut through the hype and provide a technical but relatively accessible introduction to the topic. I hope you find this to be a useful resource. :-)

We urgently need a parliamentary debate on Palantir. Please sign this & share with your network. Via @the-citizens.bsky.social & @change.org.

www.change.org/p/hold-a-par...

Infographic: Peter Thiel and detail of Palantir’s contracts with UK government departments, agencies and authorities. Where the amount is unknown, the contract has not been included in the overall £672m+ spend. The bulk of the contracts are post 2018, the Olympics contract dates back to 2012 and some work with unreleased dates could be earlier. Design: Lynsey Irvine

NEW Nerve investigation reveals extent of Palantir's enmeshment in UK state operations

Peter Thiel's surveillance company has deals with government bodies amounting to at least £670m – inc. £15m contract with nuclear weapons agency

By @carolecadwalla.bsky.social Charlie Young & Max Colbert

🔗⏬

If your repository `README.md` file has lots of helpful info included, even if out-of-sight directly by using `<details/>` tags, then DeepWiki does a good job of summarizing and structuring written descriptions -- such as the configuration and microservice environment used in this repo.

... DSPy declarative LLM integration, Opik observability and optimization, and finally the Streamlit app for runtime.

These materials start from Senzing entity resolution, through RDFlib and NetworkX graph representation, spaCy/GLiNER parsing and extraction, TextGraph construction of a lexical graph, LanceDB vector embedding for the text chunks, ...

DerwenAI/strwythura | DeepWiki This document provides a high-level overview of the Strwythura system, including its architecture, core components, data flow, and design philosophy. Strwythura is an entity-resolved knowledge graph (

DeepWiki generated an overview of how to use the `Strwythura` repo:
deepwiki.com/DerwenAI/str...

#Senzing

An Algebraic Foundation for Knowledge Graph Construction (Extended Version) Although they exist since more than ten years already, have attracted diverse implementations, and have been used successfully in a significant number of applications, declarative mapping languages fo...

So far, declarative mapping languages for knowledge graph construction (RML and the likes) have lacked a solid formal foundation 😶‍🌫️

⚡ Our latest work, accepted for #ESWC2025, changes that: We introduce an algebra for mappings, provide a formal semantics for RML, and more.

🔎 arxiv.org/abs/2503.10385

Kudos to everyone who's contributed!

That said, the `kglab` library gets used for internal training at Bloomberg, for conference tutorials, and has multiple a academic citations: scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=b...

Admittedly, in the ~6 years since we introduce `kglab` there have been some excellent products also getting into this game: both `maplib` from Data Treehouse and G.V() come to mind, and provide excellent capabilities.

You'll need some integrations, and `kglab` explores these -- plus shows abstraction layers which you can use for integrations in your production code.

For example, you might want to work in Python with an RDF representation of some graph data ... great, you can use `RDFlib` ... but then what if you want to run SHACL shape rules, or OWL closures to infer graph elements? Then what if you want to run graph algorithms on that data and visualize it?

This project is intended as a multi-part tutorial which illustrates and examines how to use several different areas of graph technologies which had not been integrated within open source previously.

Latest update is v1.0.1, key changes:
- support for `RDFlib` v7.x which caused many breaking changes on *many* projects
- backing out dependencies for projects which haven't been maintained enough to retain integrations: `pslpython`, `igraph`, etc.
- making sure the tutorial notebooks work properly

GitHub - DerwenAI/kglab: Graph Data Science: an abstraction layer in Python for building knowledge graphs, integrated with popular graph libraries – atop Pandas, NetworkX, RAPIDS, RDFlib, pySHACL, PyV... Graph Data Science: an abstraction layer in Python for building knowledge graphs, integrated with popular graph libraries – atop Pandas, NetworkX, RAPIDS, RDFlib, pySHACL, PyVis, morph-kgc, pslpyth...

We've released `kglab` version 1.x, which is long overdue -- this should have been positioned as a full release years ago!

github.com/DerwenAI/kglab

🦕The 20th conference on Neurosymbolic AI will be in Lisbon, Portugal, September 1-4, 2026!

The CFP is out: 2026.nesyconf.org/call-for-pap... with two phases:
🚨 Deadline 1: Feb 24 (abstract), Mar 3 (full)
🚨 Deadline 2: Jun 9 (abstract), Jun 16 (full)

#neurosymbolic #NeSy2026

TESCREALism and the Race to Build an AI God (1,500 words)

New article on the TESCREAL ideologies and ongoing race to build a Digital Deity. I discuss my recent Oxford Research Encyclopedia article on the topic, as well as my forthcoming book: "Digital Deities: Silicon Valley’s Quest to Replace Humanity with AI." Like and subscribe. :-)

Tech Billionaires Build Apocalypse Bunkers to Save Themselves from the World They Destroyed But who will protect them from us once they've all retreated to their underground shelters? (1,800 words)

New article: "But who will protect them from us once they've all retreated to their underground shelters?"

F*ck the billionaires. Eat the rich. Down with the oligarchy.

www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/tech-billi...

The videos of ICE agents in Minneapolis captured by citizens are being seen on social media feeds across the globe

John Mulholland compiles the most widely shared videos and examines what effect they are having on US public opinion

www.thenerve.news/p/ice-minnea...

220,000 Fewer Workers: How Trump’s Cuts Affected Every Federal Agency New data offers the first clear view of the impact of the buyouts and firings.

Brutal to be reminded of the extent of the USAID staff cuts via the data published in this article from The Upshot on @nytimes.com on how the Trump administrations cuts have affected every US federal agency

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Frequently asked questions about The Coin Laundry investigation What’s a blockchain? Is The Coin Laundry based on leaked documents? Are crypto transactions anonymous? These questions and more, answered.

ICIJ's #CoinLaundry investigation exposes how cryptocurrency companies empower a shadow economy that lavishly profits from crime. To learn how the crypto is regulated, whether crypto transactions are anonymous or pseudonymous, and more, visit our FAQs:

Graphs come into play here, since context from knowledge graphs can help guide agents toward better outcomes, and also the “competency questions” used for knowledge graph construction feed nicely into generating evaluations to use for LLM observability. Let’s talk about optimization with Claire!

Senzing has been using Opik in our AI tutorials, and Claire’s talks about leveraging math-driven thinking to build better AI caught our attention, especially her analogies which help explain relatively complex mathematical approaches in terms of real world examples.

This is a real world example of a math-guided design. This feedback mirrors the dopamine signaling in animal brains which regulates emotional and motivational behavior through “rewards” given by neurotransmitters.

If you step back and look in big picture terms, this feedback loop is essentially the same used in reinforcement learning, where agents learn and improve through feedback based on how they interact with their environment.

Agent optimizers include GEPA, HRPO, and more -- and can be extended.

Open a browser-based dashboard for your application and see how the evaluations of LLM integrations have run on different sessions. At last count, Opik includes 52 integrations with popular Python tooling for AI (we counted) plus more for Ruby, TypeScript, .NET, and Java.

Opik is a popular open source platform which gives you all the tools you need for LLM observability (logging, debugging, evaluations, experiments), enabling end-to-end AI Engineering through development, testing, and production. Plus there’s an open-source SDK for agent and prompt optimization.