Yung En Chee

Clark & Dawe material

"Peter Dutton was viewed as lacking connection with women & younger voters. Submissions urged a more empathetic and modern presentation of leadership."

"Mr Dutton acknowledged that he trusted the judgment
of very few of his colleagues & doubted the motives of many of them." 🤣

thank you! that would be tremendous 🙏

Warned of grimness by the early The Point live blog, I braced myself

But on first skim, I see touches of heroic diplomacy & hilarity (unintentional though that might be)

I do believe I'll enjoy the Coalition Review of the 2025 Federal Election by Pru Goward & Nick Minchin (download at link👇)

indeed, the Oct 2018 IPCC report was very much what hit me between the eyes...

Not once do the academics or the journalists writing the piece mention the fact that language models just get shit wrong *all the time*.

It is a really shockingly bad piece and shame on everyone involved. You're helping to create the air of credulous, key-jangling awe that justifies all this

In 2024 the San Francisco-based Anthropic deployed its model across the US Department of War and other national security agencies to speed up war planning. Claude became part of a system developed by the war-tech company Palantir with the Pentagon to “dramatically improve intelligence analysis and enable officials in their decision-making processes”. “The AI machine is making recommendations for what to target, which is actually much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought,” said Craig Jones, a senior lecturer in political geography at Newcastle University and an expert in kill chains. “So you’ve got scale and you’ve got speed, you’re [carrying out the] assassination-style strikes at the same time as you’re decapitating the regime’s ability to respond with all the aerial ballistic missiles. That might have taken days or weeks in historic wars. [Now] you’re doing everything at once.” The latest AI systems can rapidly analyse mountains of information on potential targets from drone footage to telecommunications interceptions as well as human intelligence. Palantir’s system uses machine learning to identify and prioritise targets and recommend weaponry, accounting for stockpiles and previous performance against similar targets. It also uses automated reasoning to evaluate legal grounds for a strike.

“This is the next era of military strategy and military technology,” said David Leslie, professor of ethics, technology and society at Queen Mary University of London, who has observed demonstrations of AI military systems. He also warned that reliance on AI can result in “cognitive off-loading”. Humans tasked with making a strike decision can feel detached from its consequences because the effort to think it through has been made by a machine. On Saturday 165 people, many children, were killed in a missile strike that hit a school in southern Iran, according to state media. It appeared to be close to a military barracks and the UN called it “a grave violation of humanitarian law”. The US military has said it is looking into the reports.

In the days before the Iran strikes, the US administration had said it would banish Anthropic from its systems after it refused to allow its AI to be used for fully autonomous weapons or surveillance of US citizens. But it remains in use until it is phased out. Anthropic’s rival, OpenAI, quickly signed its own deal with the Pentagon for military use of its models. “The advantage is in the speed of decision-making, the collapsing of planning from what might have taken days or weeks before to minutes or seconds,” said Leslie. “These systems produce a set of options for human decision makers but [they’ve] got a much narrower time band … to evaluate the recommendation.” “The deployment of AI is expanding,” said Prerana Joshi, research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a defence thinktank. “It is being done across countries’ defence estates … across logistics, training, decision management, maintenance.” She added: “AI is a technology that will allow decision makers, and anyone in that chain, to improve the productivity and efficiency of what they do. It’s a way of synthesising data at a much faster pace that is helpful to decision makers.”

This article and the academics quoted are a stunning illustration of how both media and academia have fundamentally failed to recognise how a random number generator is being used to widen the already-fucking-wide permission space for mass murder

Both now helping that project

archive.ph/wip/RlMO5

😮

The war on Iran likely brings a new oil price shock and windfall profits.

So, who stands to win?

Our research shows: Last time around (2022), the US reaped the largest fossil fuel profits of any country ($377bn). 50% went to the top 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A🧵

On World Wildlife Day, we learn from @mrrexpatrick.bsky.social's FOI-based report that while the federal environment dept "decision brief recommended that the original decision to allow salmon farming should be revoked" the Albo govt chose toxic, industrial salmon farming over Maugean Skate survival

"Pack of Mongrels". Politics beats extinction of Maugean Skate - Michael West A decision brief on protecting the threatened Maugean Skate shows that the Labor Government puts wildlife extinction second to politics.

Docs show Labor put politics ahead of species extinction in lead-up to election @mrrexpatrick.bsky.social on the Maugean Skate
#auspol #FOI
michaelwest.com.au/pack-of-mong...

I copped a bit of flak yesterday for pointing out the squandered futility of Albo's 30-year parliamentary career.

But Fiona Katauskas seems to agree:
#auspol

I bang on about this cos the normalisation of racism in political discourse (One Nation, Coalition, Labor in hot pursuit), mainstream media, and the cowardly silence of public institutions is taking us closer to the ugliness in the UK👇

Lidia Thorpe is pulled up by the Senate President for not referring to Pauline Hanson by her “correct title”

Thorpe accepts the ruling and agrees to use the correct title
“Racist” 🔥 #auspol

Spark Space | Linktree A safe, fully-equipped workspace serving students & workers in Gaza.

Wonderful update from Spark! The volunteers have just completed renovations on this amazing workspace where students can connect to classes, and freelancers can work remote jobs to feed their families.

Support Palestinian autonomy and dignity: linktr.ee/sparkworkspace

Extraordinary crowds as a mass funeral procession begins in Minab, Iran for the 165 school girls & teachers killed in the US/Israeli school strike on Saturday.

Many outcomes of this war are uncertain. But a renewed generation of hatred towards the West is now baked in.

(🎥 Alireza Akbari)

YouTube video by Forbrukerrådet - Norwegian Consumer Council A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator

Please enjoy this message from the Norwegian consumer protection council

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Up...

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Excerpt from Loberal Party election autopsy.

Yes, women think the Coalition are sexist, and migrant communities think the party is racist, but that's burying the lede: four in five young people loathe it.

Australians who need care because of age or disability shouldn’t be reduced to an algorithm | Georgia Van Toorn When we relinquish care to a computer, we put lives at the mercy of a flawed system

Care cannot be reduced to rules and scores alone. Ageing and disability are human experiences, and decisions about care have profound, life-altering consequences. When we relinquish human judgment and capacity to override automated decisions, we put lives at the mercy of a flawed system.

Senator Hanson can distract with culture wars and call me a bitch as much as she wants - her record tells the real story of what she's about. 🧵

It's World Wildlife Day.

If you love Australian wildlife and wish @albomp.bsky.social's government would do far more to protect and care for it, smash repost!

How long is a peace of war?

How impudent, Pup!

Do you see Albo, Penny & Richard askin' questions before signing Australia up for US-Israeli aggression⁉️

"trumpeting the essentiality of the international rules-based order in preserving global peace and stability" whilst mindlessly backing illegal US-Israeli aggression sure is a great way of taking an axe to 'international rules-based order'

is there a public interest thought process behind this❓

you can see how these politicians who seem allergic to thinking, deliberation, and reflection want "to see AI “widely taken up across government in every department” and are considering "AI for cabinet submissions"

Australia’s shameless support for the US attack on Iran makes us gullible, duplicitous, or both | Allan Behm For Anthony Albanese – as well as Mark Carney and Keir Starmer – to go along with Trump and Netanyahu’s cynical ploy negates any sense of moral authority we possess – a catastrophe for the rules-based order * Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast The ease and speed with which Australia, along with Britain and Canada, fell in behind Donald Trump’s attack on Iran was startling. For a country that is constantly trumpeting the essentiality of the international rules-based order in preserving global peace and stability, Australia is shameless in its ability to slide into the American slipstream. And to hide behind Iran’s alleged possession of nuclear weapons – or at least its ability to produce them – as justification for the attacks and the obliteration of Iran’s governing leadership, portrays us as gullible, duplicitous or both. Trump claimed that Iran’s ability to construct nuclear weapons was destroyed last June. Truth or lie? It cannot be both. The claim that Iran had the ability to do so until last weekend was either true or false. It could not be both. So what exactly was the case for yet another unprovoked and illegal attack on Iran? Allan Behm advises on international and security affairs at the Australia Institute in Canberra Continue reading...

Australia’s shameless support for the US attack on Iran makes us gullible, duplicitous, or both | Allan Behm

The UK & Australian prime minsters both graduated with honours from the Groucho Marx school of policy making — "those are my principles, and if you don't like them...well, I have others!"

NEW Paper led by Fiona Hoegh-Guldberg on principles, concepts, & a framework for thinking through integrated biodiversity & water management at multiple scales in urban design

Nature-Water Design: Integrating biodiversity and water sensitive urban design

👉 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Please please please get on this

Excellent FOI-based investigative report by Bianca Hall confirms that if you're WoodCIDE & persistently throw hissy fits about the "approval conditions" of your climate-destroying Gas project to 2070, the @albomp.bsky.social WILL capitulate AND obediently get on board w your media statement too