Peter Campbell

Alex Karp Wants to Make Palantir the De Facto Operating System of the U.S. Government, Says Biographer A new book explores how a liberal academic became the CEO that now embraces the Trump administration and ICE.

NEW: I learned a lot talking to Alex Karp's biographer, Michael Steinberger. Namely, that Palantir has ambitions to become what IBM used to be for the U.S. government: its de facto operating system.

www.inc.com/sam-blum/ale...

I use Claude (an AI) to scan my posts for spelling and grammar errors. On the most recent post (about the East Wing, link below), I got a really amazing addendum.
www.pbump.net/o/yes-most-a...

YouTube video by ANTI- Records Mavis Staples - "Sad and Beautiful World"

Mavis Staples sings Sparklehorse? Cor.

youtu.be/HAZGQG3yHNo?...

OpenAI Says Hundreds of Thousands of ChatGPT Users May Show Signs of Manic or Psychotic Crisis Every Week OpenAI Says Hundreds of Thousands of ChatGPT Users May Show Signs of Manic or Psychotic Crisis Every Week

The fact that these are the numbers the company will put on the record … www.wired.com/story/chatgp...

I'm old enough to remember when parents groups put warning stickers on CDs because they worried suggestive lyrics might lead to anything from drug use to teen sex to suicide.

But if a robot explicitly takes you through the steps rather than a subtle Judas Priest lyric, I guess it's okay.

After submitting a FOIA request UKRI, I obtained success rates by three grant call scheme and I can only say that I am disheartened by the results:

- AHRC Responsive Mode 2025: 2%
- ESRC New Investigator Grant 2025: 1%
- ESRC Research Grant Round 2025: 1%

"We all knew a while ago just how badly the promise of this Labour government was failing when it comes to our sector. This white paper simply reinforces that we are on our own, that government is not interested in proactively reforming the HE system and has no new ideas to offer"

Wrongful Death Suit Against OpenAI Now Claims Company Removed ChatGPT's Suicide Guardrails First wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI over teen's suicide amended to allege that company deliberately weakened protections against self-harm.

A family’s lawsuit against OpenAI over their teen son’s death has taken an even darker turn, with their amended complaint alleging that the company intentionally softened protections against user self-harm in the months before his suicide, prioritizing engagement instead of safety.

Column | ChatGPT just came out with its own web browser. Use it with caution. OpenAI’s Atlas promises AI-powered convenience. The price? Letting ChatGPT track and store “memories” of what you do online.

ChatGPT’s new Atlas browser doesn’t just see what you read — it remembers it.

@eff.org’s Lena Cohen showed me it even logged “memories” of her looking for *abortion care* and her doctor’s name. Out-surveils even Chrome.

My @washingtonpost.com column: wapo.st/49bOcVC

🎵'Everybody knows the scene is dead/
There'll be a GitHub repo for your bed'🎵

"Idi Amin x 20" - this is Tory policy now.

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs

- Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%
- Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%
- Social Sciences by 50–70%
- History by 60%
- Biology by 75%
- The German department will lose all PhD seats
- Sociology from six PhD students to zero

The entire "free speech on campus" moral panic was manufactured to blackmail us into making space in intellectual life for bigots and charlatans who couldn't get there on their own merits. Its a DEI scheme for fascism. Congratulations to everyone who took it at face value.

As yes British football in the 1980s. Well known for its good-natured fun. He's a ridiculous person.

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.

ChatGPT boss predicts when AI could cure cancer

We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right. Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases. In a few weeks, we plan to put out a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 4o (we hope it will be better!). If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing). In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our “treat adult users like adults” principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults. 12:02 PM · Oct 14, 2025 · 1.2M Views

Sam Altman went from “AI will cure cancer" to "ChatGPT porn" in less than a month

OpenAI is trying to clamp down on ‘bias’ in ChatGPT GPT-5 is better at resisting liberal ‘pressure,’ the company says.

The administration “is currently pressuring OpenAI and other AI companies to make their models more conservative-friendly.”

Great (paid) PhD opportunity. Excellent environment, conditions, and supervisors. And a topic close to my heart. (Selfish reason for promoting this: I fear there won't be enough concerts for retired me to go to. Geen dag zonder Bach.) vacatures.knaw.nl/job/The-Hagu...

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems... SIMON: What? SHAPIRO: ...Or saying... SIMON: You imagine that? SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over. SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level. SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this. SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

UK’s arm’s length public bodies are highly vulnerable to politicisation Seven in ten Britons say it is important for top scientific institutions to be independent in exclusive new polling.

🧵🚨

The UK’s independent scientific bodies are highly vulnerable to politicisation - over the past 5 months I've been working with @martinmckee.bsky.social to map out their vulnerabilities and it's not good news.

Today our report is published!
www.ucl.ac.uk/policy-lab/n...

1/11

We’ve obtained data showing that more than 7,000 workers have gone to the government’s employment tribunal penalty enforcement scheme since it was launched in 2016 – 75% of them did not get their money

That’s £36m in unpaid funds

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

All these people really want is to pay no taxes and be treated with floor scraping deference. Everything else is just bullshit in pursuit of that goal.

Screenshot of an Express article; it says: Robert Jenrick lists 30 'activist judges' he vows to axe in war on UK's open border In a bold move, Robert Jenrick is set to unveil a controversial plan targeting what he calls 'activist' judges, at the Conservative Party conference.

I say this with the bluntness it requires: they will get people murdered if this continues. This is not just populism anymore either: it’s completely unhinged and a deliberate choice that does endanger lives. I am not saying this lightly at all.

Utterly despicable.

Patricia Routledge was in the Alan Jay Lerner and Leonard Bernstein musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The show ran for only a week. At the Friday night performance, Routledge sang "Duet for One," in which she simultaneously played two presidential first ladies, Lucy Hayes and Julia Grant. Tony Walton had designed a very clever wig that was a bouffant when it was flipped up and had a hair ribbon and bangs when it was flipped down. Routledge finished the number and the audience cheered. And the applause carried over into the next scene. She left the stage, the scenery changed, and the actors for the next scene came onstage, but the audience would not stop applauding. Finally, she came back onstage because the stage manager realized it was fruitless to start the next scene. She took a bow twice. Once with the bouffant wig and then again with the bangs and hair ribbon, thereby taking one bow for each of the first ladies.

YouTube video by maxinebendix Kitty 2 - With Patricia Routledge - BBC

"I never speak behind people's backs. If I've anything nasty to say, I pop it on a postcard"

RIP to the greatest to ever do it.

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

Suspect shot after stabbings at Manchester synagogue Greater Manchester Police said four people were hit by car and also suffered stab wounds

Suspect shot after stabbings at Manchester synagogue on.ft.com/48LOnqr

OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this