Joanna Bryson

U.S. sub sinks Iranian warship off Sri Lanka, killing 87 and expanding war zone A U.S. submarine sank an Iranian warship off the southern coast of Sri Lanka, killing dozens of sailors and dramatically widening Washington's pursuit of the Iranian navy.

A US submarine sinking a lonely, dinky Iranian surface ship an ocean away from the theater of the main conflict—and 9000
miles from North America—makes it pretty clear the US is fighting a general war, without the declaration required by the Constitution. www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...

An official declaration that I am doing oral exams with students (one of the downsides of GenAI!) and then getting on a plane to Europe, and so won't be able to respond to any more of the comments/queries/questions that are proliferating (and are now too many for any human to respond to anyways).

Speaking of not your friend

The spec should and can include making it understandable to you.

I got a little worried how far back gemini was digging and asked it to tell me about its gdpr compliance. It was not good at that, but reports you can have no memory at all, or MINIMUM 18 months retention, and it’s a setting on your google account. Default iirc was forever.

While hilarious at first, bad idea in retrospect: It subtly encouraged me toward anthropomorphic thinking and regarding the LLM as some kind of friend -- even in me! And I've read enough @j2bryson.bsky.social to know better. Let's reaffirm: "The model is not my friend"

IT Support Specialist (gn) part-time (20 hours/week)

Berlin tech people who need some side cash! Come do @hertieschool.bsky.social tech support 20 hours a week for 9 months. I promise to email you regularly :-D But bad news, it's a lot of Microsoft...

hertie-school.dvinci-easy.com/en/p/en/jobs...

Sorry, I didn't mean that v-dem had made that classification of the US, rather that I was referencing a term from their ontology, as per the link. Thanks @vdeminstitute.bsky.social for letting us know about the forthcoming classifications!! bsky.app/profile/vdem...

Sorry, I didn't mean that you had made that classification of the US, rather that I was using a term of yours. I hope that's clear from the link? Though I can see why you'd be sensitive about misattribution of categorisation!

+ updated chapter with @chrisschmitz.ai, also addressing autocracy:

A Moral Agency Framework for Legitimate Integration of AI in Bureaucracies

in Sailing the Uncharted Waters: Public Administration and Emerging Technologies, Tan, Dan, and Sorin (eds.)
joanna-bryson.squarespace.com/s/a-moral-ag...

I'm blunt about the US now being an electoral autocracy (per @vdeminstitute.bsky.social cf www.v-dem.net/our-work/res...) but explain EU #digitalGovernance, the US own (still extant) strengths, and make recommendations about how to work together in military cooperation in the AI age.

New, by me:
Human-Centred Control of AI Is Both Possible and Necessary

for the NATO Science for Peace and Security Series: The Role of Transatlantic Cooperation in AI Human Oversight in Defence, Francisco Andrés Pérez (ed.)
joanna-bryson.squarespace.com/s/human-cent...

Well at least Labour are re nationalising the rail & maybe water, whereas Trump (and present Conservatives) are interested in a small autocracy/kleptocracy with no capacity to enforce e.g. money laundering, rule of law. Which they will eventually need to maintain their wealth and status. But stupid.

Rwanda asylum plan - Wikipedia

History or at least Wikipedia describe such policies as their Prime Ministers'. But when announced, the Home Secretary is used to give the policy a face. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwanda_... "The UK and Rwanda…was a policy proposed by the governments of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak whereby…"

First Rwanda deportation flight to leave UK on 14 June, says Priti Patel Group of asylum seekers sent formal notices advising they will be relocated to east African country, say officials

How are labour different from the conservatives? it's as if neither party has the interest or guts to rebuild government capacity or show moral leadership. No wonder greens are winning. Too bad LibDems were too "economically liberal" to invest in progressivism. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022...

Mahmood to stop study visas from four countries due to 'abuse' The government will end study visas from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan, due to what she says is abuse.

So you found out that the poorest and most desperate nations' migrants are most likely to change status in compliance with the law, and you decided the thing to do about this was collective "punishment" for good behaviour? www.bbc.com/news/article... #UK #migration via @conjugateprior.org

All I can think about is Jeff Bezos saying that he slashed jobs at the Washington Post — including those of foreign correspondents in the Middle East — based on "the data," and a few weeks later a whole war breaks out in the Middle East that these laid off folks would have covered as true experts.

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

Hi everyone! Here’s your semi-regular Bridgy Fed status update. We’ve been busy since last time! The two big new features we launched were domain blocklists (GitHub) and responding to unbridged users (GitHub). We’ve seen good feedback and usage on both, especially responding to unbridged users. Please keep the feedback coming! We also significantly improved bridging speed, especially to Bluesky. For a couple months, it slowed down to an average delay of 3-5 minutes, with outliers that took so long that we occasionally dropped them entirely. Not good. We worked hard to optimize and managed to cut that average delay down to just 5-10 seconds, which feels way better. We shipped a bunch of smaller stuff too: * Bluesky standard.site support (still rolling out) * Improve pinned posts, notably when they were pinned before a user enabled the bridge * Fediverse: use Article `preview` field * Web UI: add buttons to unblock domain blocklists in settings * Web UI: bug fix for raw HTML appearing in some warning messages * bug fix for linking @-mentions of unbridged fediverse users * bug fix for Webfinger XRD output * Misc reliability improvements to our ATProto firehose server and client * Unfollowed everyone from the @ap.brid.gy Bluesky bot account. Its large number of follows (65k+) had unintentionally landed it on a handful of “follows too many people” automated blocklists. As usual, feel free to ping us with feedback, questions, and bug reports, and please support us on Patreon! You can follow the _now_ label on GitHub to see what we’re currently focusing on. See you on the bridge!

New status update! Responding to unbridged users, domain blocklists, big speedups, reliability improvements, @standard.site, and more.

Seems to suggest the plan wasn’t regime change at all but different personnel. There’s a surprise.

1908: the Lancet, one of the most respected scientific journals, calls for 18 age limit on reading in bed amidst a moral panic surrounding children becoming "addicted" to novels, which were "designed to keep kids hooked" and destroy their attention/mental health

As long as this penalty has built into it the understanding that everyone can make mistakes in assessing others’ potential sometimes. Not bots, but maybe an ecr that 5 years later decides they can replace themselves. I wouldn’t want to add to the penalties of taking risks on interesting people.

A problem that I'd like people to consider is fake (sock puppet) authors on arXiv submitting papers to boost the citation counts of authors. ArXiv recently tightened its endorsement process, but one fake author who "gets through" can create and endorse many more accounts.

Trump's trying to find the guy who did this.

Resist ‘dangerous and socially unacceptable’ age checks for social media, scientists warn Computer scientists are campaigning against the global march toward age checks online.

Read ALL of the 6 page open letter linked in this short summary. The letter (like the article at the head of this thread) documents the complete lack of evidence in support of child bans, as well as the enormous list of harms for doing this kind of ID. www.politico.eu/article/age-...
#autocracy

relates to my #transnationalUtility idea, perhaps (haven't read yet, just noting.)

Screenshot of the "Does that use a lot of energy?" online app

Hannah Ritchie has built a fun little tool where you can compare energy usage of various products and activities.

This is super helpful imho, because it's so hard to develop intuitions even just about the scales involved here.

hannahritchie.substack.com/p/does-that-...

AI, Sacred Violence, and War—The Case of Gaza An open access book on Israel’s use of Algorithmic Intelligence (AI) and other military high tech in the torture and seizure of the Gaza Strip

Have you read this? link.springer.com/book/10.1007... (OA) It It was the only academic publication I could find talking about Lavender & Where's Daddy. It's a bit "direct" and I think maybe 6% of it goes too far, but no one has been talking about the accurate 94% and this very much matters.

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

Please use something like @ap.brid.gy so we can share these important posts on mastodon too?