Reuben Binns

Time limited discounts are wage theft

a woman is looking at a chalkboard with a lot of math equations on it . ALT: a woman is looking at a chalkboard with a lot of math equations on it .

The Information Commissioner's Office fined 23andMe ... £2.3m for GDPR infringements in ... '23

I've noticed the opposing team's fans only cheer when the opponents score on us. To win those fans over, I recommend we score on ourselves repeatedly; that will surely make them so happy they'll start supporting us. And I'm sure all our fans will keep cheering for us—who else is there to cheer for?

💯

Trying to grow the UK AI sector by building data centers is like trying to grow the university sector by building paper factories.

Graphic which reads "Mayor of London / It was predicted to take 193 years to meet legal limits for air pollution in London/ We did it in 9"

I remember being told that it would take 193 years to reach legal limits for nitrogen dioxide.

I decided this was unacceptable.

Thanks to the bold policies we put in place, we've managed to do it in nine years - 184 years earlier than expected.

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

Save the EU Ad Libraries Meta may soon switch off ad libraries in the EU and remove data going back to 2018. Help ensure this data is archived for research.

Google just wiped EU data from its political ad library. Meta’s ban on political ads in the EU starts soon and we're worried they might do the same.

We need a backup of the EU Meta Ad Library now. If you have data (2018–present) or skills to help, let us know:
ir96l7a6vsf.typeform.com/to/fIk9XMZT

"Lend me ten pounds, and I'll buy you a drink" The Pogues, Boys from the County Hell

For any colleagues who are, like me, concerned about the threats Gen AI poses to the integrity of academic research, learning, and stewardship of knowledge, a counterpoint:

"AGAINST THE UNCRITICAL ADOPTION OF ‘AI’
TECHNOLOGIES IN ACADEMIA" - @olivia.science et al philarchive.org/archive/GUEATU

As well as research, these roles involve teaching on our part-time Professional MSc (www.cs.ox.ac.uk/pmp/), which I find extremely rewarding. Our students typically work full-time in tech, are highly motivated, and bring real-world experience into the classroom. Please reach out if interested!

We're hiring!

2x Associate Prof / Prof with Tutorial Fellowship

5x AssProf/Prof with non-Tutorial Fellowship at @kelloggoxford.bsky.social

For the latter 5 posts, we're looking for 3 doing research in AI, 1x software engineering, 1x cybersecurity.

www.cs.ox.ac.uk/aboutus/vaca...

🙋‍♀️Our Society for Hopeful Technologists newsletter #2 is out! 📩Make sure you have subscribed to it to get all the news📨 It's such a pleasure to be part of this group and strategise towards a more Hopeful tech future 🌅
We will be organising events and come together to decide how it will work ✨️

bsky.app/profile/rdbi...

As someone with 'human centered' in my job title, I'd like to point out that it originally described a movement of workers who wanted to take over technology production and switch it from capitalist and military ends, towards socially useful technologies (cf Mike Cooley and the Lucas Plan)

I've seen a lot of papers evaluate LLM performance with another LLM, which has always felt dodgy. Here's an example of why that might go wrong:

With news of a reported settlement with Anthropic I went back to check the class action form and it now allows authors outside the US to input their address, so it may be worth adding your known pirated titles (from the LibGen pirate database) www.lieffcabraser.com/anthropic-au...

Hey, I have had some questions about who is allowed to file.

Here is the class certification:

Steve Shirley escaped the Holocaust as a child & went on to found one of the earliest software startups. The really impressive part? She employed women programmers who had been pushed out of the workforce after having kids, & allowed them flexible, family friendly, work from home jobs—in the 1960s!

Pro Revolution Soccer | Novara Media New Media for a Different Politics

The Novara one already exists! novaramedia.com/category/aud...

Deficits likely as overseas students ‘loss-making’ under levy Middle-tier universities on ‘wafer-thin margins’ face starkest financial challenges from government proposal, policy analysts suggest

Universities make a loss on home teaching. They make a loss on state-sponsored research. Now they will make a loss on international students. So there will be no activities at all that even break even. In those circs you cannot continue: the end.
www.timeshighereducation.com/news/deficit...

A lot of AI defenders will point to internet skeptics of the 1990s who said the web was overhyped, when the better analogy is much more recent.

Remember when the metaverse was so inevitable that Mark Zuckerberg renamed his entire company Meta?

Dr Reuben Binns, Kellogg Fellow and Associate Professor in
@compscioxford.bsky.social, warns that new “dynamic pay” models in the gig economy could undermine workers’ financial stability.

➡️ www.thetimes.com/business-mon...

Are you afraid of LLMs teaching people how to build bioweapons? Have you tried just... not teaching LLMs about bioweapons?

@eleutherai.bsky.social‬ and the UK AISI joined forces to see what would happen, pretraining three 6.9B models for 500B tokens and producing 15 total models to study

Come to think of it, comically bad LLM outputs and official government advice are not mutually exclusive categories.

When @michae.lv sent me a screenshot of the advice I assumed it was from a comically bad LLM

Institutional bulwarks against lawlessness only function for as long as the institutions play that role.

After that, they are just another means to give the exercise of power the colour of law.

Devotion to institutions, per se, is a kind of foreshortening of the imaginative horizon.

They fail.

Why ‘dynamic pay’ is the new way to rip you off Workers are being offered personalised payments for each job — but often that means they’re get a smaller piece of the pie

And some more in The Times: www.thetimes.com/business-mon...

AI agents are 'If This, Then That', except you never know quite what this might be, or what that might do