Simon Friederich

Leo Lucassen en de grenzen van eerlijk debat Mijn repliek op Lucassens NRC-opinie en wat dit zegt over het migratiedebat

@leol.bsky.social reageerde zaterdag in NRC samen met zijn broer op mijn opiniestuk van een week ervoor. Helaas voldoet zijn betoog niet aan serieuze standaarden voor goed debat – en dat is geen incident. Lees hier mijn reactie op Substack: open.substack.com/pub/hofhuis/...

Will the EU now ban 'sausage' and 'burger' from plant-based alternatives? Could Europe get any dumber?

The EU wants to ban words like “burger” + “sausage” from plant-based foods. So get ready for “protein tubes” + “alternative discs.” 🙃 Nobody’s confused — except Brussels. Consumers + the planet deserve better. #NoConfusion

substack.com/home/post/p-...

Stop the EU’s Ban on “Meaty” Words for Plant-Based Foods Sign now

🚨 Next week the EU votes on banning words like burger, sausage & chicken from plant-based foods.

This is nothing short of government engaging in cartel behaviour with the meat industry right as we need to transition away from animal agriculture to fix the climate crisis.

Act now!

I just got a copy of this new book from Emily Adlam (with whom I did my masters, so this is the first book I'm reading written by a former classmate!). I'm going to try the thing where I tweet about it as I go.

Yes, and unfortunately their success is only a matter of time unless concerted action against them occurs.

Excellent list.

You're the expert, I'm not. Just trying to find out what can really be confidently inferred from your study.

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

So immigration-sceptical voters even have experience with that kind of rhetorics not being followed by effective and sustained immigration restriction. Your study is thus consistent with immigration restrictionism being a successful anti-far right strategy when pursued consistently and for long.

If any of you authors would like to respond to this, please come forward, I'd be curious: bsky.app/profile/simo...!

I worry that your analysis could be bad news for *any* attempt to drive back the far right.

-- Immigration restrictionist rhetoric short-term backfires electorally bc not credible
-- Immigration restrictionist action long-term helps electorally
-- There is no feasible alternative to immigration restrictionist action in order to long-term stop and reverse the rise of the far right.

Extremely interesting. I am not convinced that your impressive study is a sufficient basis for your substantive recommendations, though.

The following seems a serious possibility not excluded by your study:

(see next post)

When I put this to GPT5 it gets it right. ("Ball containment would be poor... There’s usually clearance at the bottom too, enough for the ball to sneak out if it’s struck low.")

AGI is not inevitable, and if you are American, you may consider getting active to stop its development.

Great piece by @garrisonlovely.bsky.social.

In contrast, crying "AI hype" makes people complacent and only plays into the hands of the industry.

If the answers were in the training data, it would indeed be far less impressive. I am assuming that they aren't.

Apparently, the computing power used was quite extraordinary, though. Still, the effort necessary to achieve this kind of thing will also come down.

Alexander Wei on X: "1/N I’m excited to share that our latest @OpenAI experimental reasoning LLM has achieved a longstanding grand challenge in AI: gold medal-level performance on the world’s most prestigious math competition—the International Math Olympiad (IMO). https://t.co/SG3k6EknaC" / X 1/N I’m excited to share that our latest @OpenAI experimental reasoning LLM has achieved a longstanding grand challenge in AI: gold medal-level performance on the world’s most prestigious math competition—the International Math Olympiad (IMO). https://t.co/SG3k6EknaC

Again, so much for "AI hype":

An OpenAI experimental reasoning LLM has performed at gold medal level at the International Math Olympiad (IMO):

x.com/alexwei_/sta...

(To be clear, I personally find this quite depressing.)

Very nice teaser.

Thanks, Ingrid (if I may), amazing reply! I should have addressed you directly. I will read more by you and perhaps react if I feel I have anything to contribute with potential substance.

My worries about advocacy apply in particular to policy suggestions I myself have made in the past.

Yes, those are definitely very important issues.

It's certainly an idea that should be studied, but there are reasons that economists are profoundly sceptical. Their objections may not be the last word, but I would be a little more comfortable if research on and advocacy of limitarianism were more clearly separated.

Inside the Secret Meeting Where Mathematicians Struggled to Outsmart AI The world's leading mathematicians were stunned by how adept artificial intelligence is at doing their jobs

So much for "hype":

'Ono says. “I don’t want to add to the hysteria, but in some ways these large language models are already outperforming most of our best graduate students in the world.”'

www.scientificamerican.com/article/insi...

I find the monoculture aspect almost uniformly bad. I came over because of Musk and the changes he made there, but I find it much more boring here than Twitter was, and it doesn't have anything remotely resembling the rich (and often quite nuanced) AI content that X has. Can you understand?

Gefeliciteerd. Goed voor CDA en voor Nederland. Een premier die eerder geduldig en zonder ideologie academische literatuur over technische aspecten van de energietransitie aan het brede publiek heeft uitgelegd, zou een uitstekende keuze zijn.

Nodig is: minder inkomensverschillen, meer ontmoeting in de publieke ruimte en meer onbevangenheid, aldus @tkupp.bsky.social @rug.nl #werkaandewinkel

Oh, how embarrassing I didn't realize.

Very useful! Could you add me?

YouTube video by TED The AI Revolution Is Underhyped | Eric Schmidt | TED

The AI revolution is underhyped -- perhaps not everywhere, but certainly on Bluesky.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=id4Y...

New paper, in Ergo: To the extent that we are sometimes cluelessness about the more indirect consequences of our actions, this speaks against a longtermist orientation, not in favour: journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article...

(The thesis may seem banal, but Hilary Greaves argued the opposite.)

Yes.

And the correct response to worries about the (power concentrating aspects of) AI is to push for regulations that limit increases in capabilities, not to refrain from use.

It seems to me that as educators we will have to do two things

1 Do evaluations of students without AI (paper and pencil tests)

2 Teach students how to use AI to be more productive

The notion that we can totally shun AI in higher ed when it will be so important is misguided.

To some extent it is already being fixed, see here for instance: futureagi.com/blogs/unders...

More generally, the more AI systems are deployed agentically, the more they will run against adverse consequences of mistakes, including hallucinations. The time scale is unclear, but it will happen.