Tom Stoneham

How many teachers could you get for an investment of $850m (and that's just the upfront cost)?

#AI is capital. Governments need to spend on people. Because people in (good) work buy stuff and pay taxes and generally make your country better.

"underlining the challenges in embedding the technology in education"

It is only a *challenge* against the background belief that there is a future where genAI in education is a good thing for anyone other than the bullshitters selling the technology.

Governments, universities, schools around […]

Post from Jie (they/them) Seeing the absurd electricity usage by AI after growing up in the 90's surrounded by campaigns telling us not to leave the lights on when we leave the room, to save power and help the environment ... like ... I cannot begin to explain how much this breaks my brain.

For me it's even worse, because i not only got that in the 90's, i also grew up in the 70's during the oil crisis. Speed limits were lowered to 55 mph to save gas, fuel efficiency standards were first introduced, President Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed […]

[Original post on chaosfem.tw]

if you see this post, your actions are:
- if you have a spare buck, give it to Wikipedia, then repost this
- if you don't have a spare buck, just repost

your action is mandatory for the world's best source of information to survive

A Halloween candy bowl placed on a doorstep, but instead of sweets, it’s filled with paperback copies of 1984 by George Orwell. A white sign above the books reads “ONE COPY OF 1984 PER CHILD” in bold black letters. The red covers feature an illustration of an eye, symbolizing surveillance. The humorous setup replaces typical Halloween treats with classic dystopian literature, suggesting an ironic “trick-or-treat for the mind.”

Educated minds for all Halloweeners 👻

Sign on a 'no kings' protest which mentions: Bible quiz Jesus said, "I was a stranger, and you _______________" A. called me names. B. put me in a cell. C. took my kids. D. welcomed me.

#nokings

“Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance.”

I think the folks who run Gemini should partner with a really powerful search engine company to get better sourcing for their AI […]

@crenquis Ah, perhaps. After all, they seem to believe in carbon capture as a way of making burning trees carbon negative 😳

Oh FFS! The Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology has just described nuclear fission as 'renewable energy'. I can see how they could re-define 'clean' to amke it 'clean energy' (it isn't, of course, for very obvious reasons) but 'renewable'? Have I missed some scientific […]

I must admit, I have done the same in equal ignorance of this law.* And I am absolutely certain that my being a white man had absolutely nothing to do with the fact I was never fined. Nothing. At. All.

*: I knew I shouldn't pour engine oil or paint or all the other pollutants I regularly see […]

Together we can understand and respond to disinformation and division - and protect our global information systems to serve people and planet.

Everything you need is in one place: http://mediarevolution.org/

Hilarious side effect of the OpenAI pivot to porn plus the Swedish ban on online pornography purchases: Paying for ChatGPT in Sweden may be a criminal act soon.

Open Access Philosophy Books - Daily Nous It's International Open Access Week. In honor of the occasion, I invite those who have authored or edited an open access book in philosophy to share it in the comments here, with a link to where it is...

Philosophers — it’s International Open Access Week. Tell us about any open access books you’ve authored or edited…

A screenshot of a statistic titled “Crime: Mentions of suspects' origins by German media” TV Reports mentioning origin in 2025: 5.4% Germans, 94.6% foreigners. Newspaper reports mentioning origin in 2025: 9.2% Germans, 90.8% foreigners. Police crime statistics in 2024: 65.7% Germans, 34.3% foreigners. Source: Thomas Hestermann, Macromedia University of Applied Sciences.

hm. i wonder what this may cause

The "CloudFlare: SSL Added and Removed Here :-)" picture from https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/cloudflare_ssl_added_and_removed_here

Whenever you see someone recommend Cloudflare or something else that decrypts and re-encrypts TLS for something, esp. for something related to open social media or media storage etc., reply with this picture from the Snowden leaks

So #StarmerOut is strongly committed to spending huge sums developing a Digital ID. The project will go over budget and probably fail, just like previous #TechnoSolutionist fantasies which don't address the real problem.

The question is: how can we make sure this otherwise wasted £££ goes […]

Ok. They’ve pissed me off.

I’m back to tell you 3 things about ID cards:

1. Migrants ALREADY HAVE biometric ID cards & govts have been trying to digitise them for years w repeated fuckups & failures causing complete chaos - they don’t work, you do not want that system for you.

China has "pledged to more than double today's [wind and solar] capacity of around 1,400GW to 3,600GW by 2035". The UK's total energy consumption is around 35GW and we struggle to produce that.

Any government that believes the future requires energy-guzzling data centres (it doesn't, fwiw) […]

I used #genAI for a 'mundane administrative task'. It did a good enough job and saved some time, but ... that just drew attention to the fact that the task was unnecessarily complex and time-consuming in the first place.

tl;dr - making tasks less labour-intensive does not thereby increase […]

My study of old #folklore gets more and more relevant to current-day affairs.

Example: All of these narratives about "Things That Cause #Autism " are basically recycled folk tales about #changelings .

Right now, we are at the: "The child is WRONG somehow - the mother must have been careless!" […]

Any San Francisco kid under the age of 5 can get a free book mailed to them every month under a new partnership announced Friday by city officials and Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.

The first book that all children will receive in the mail, addressed to them, is The Little Engine That […]

Oh FFS! Do politicians not understand anything? While the #OnlineSafetyAct is busy f**king up the internet in the name of #SaveTheChildren , the same government is giving instructions on how to evade such surveillance for anyone who has something worth hiding […]

"great people" = people good at making money, mainly for themselves but also a small group of others who don't need any more money.

This is the problem with thinking about the economy in terms of GDP: it masks extreme inequalities on which millions suffer.

#Taxation of the super-rich punishes […]

Farrukh @implausibleblog.bsky.social Far right protest today: 29 - police officers injured 9 - protestors arrested Proscribed group protests: 0 - police officers injured 1,600 - protestors arrested We have Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper to thank for this absurd anomaly

#Starmer #KeirStarmer #Fascist #Fascism #UKPOL #UKPOLITICS #TheMet #PalestineAction #DefendOurJuries #UniteTheKingdom

A screenshot of a code editor. The line numbers are in the lefthand column, running from 121 to 125. There is a comment that says "Verify packages were created and check sizes" Then line 123 says echo Verifying Lambda packages were created... and Line 124 says echo checkmark emoji colon All Lambda packages verified successfully. There is no line in here that actually did anything.

One of the ways that LLM-authored code improves productivity is by merely SAYING it does things. It's way faster than the whole time-consuming process of actually doing things. This is real code someone sent to me for review.

“using GenAI resulted in the knowledge workers creating new cognitive tasks such as assessing the AI-generated content to determine its relevance and applicability to their specific
tasks which they would not necessarily do if they had generated the content themselves.”

#AIHype is getting […]

The charges use the following action words: 'managing', 'assisting in arranging' and 'addressing' meetings.

I wonder what the evidence threshold is for first two, especially 'assisting in arranging'? Also, does it not matter what you say when addressing a meeting?

#DoJ #PlasticineAction […]

"When contacted by YorkMix about what had happened Joseph Moulton, who launched the York Flaggers and Litter Pickers campaign, said he condemned the racism. Then he went straight down and helped to clean off the graffiti on the brickwork."

Maybe, just maybe, Mr Moulton is that naive. But we all […]

Chart showing the prevalence of left-handedness since 1880. It skyrockets from 3% in the early 20th century to 12% in the 1960s, when it flatlines at remains constant to the present.

Perhaps it's time to tap the chart again. Left-handed people were once seen as sinister (the word sinister, from Latin, originally meant "left" or "on the left side") so kids were forced to be right-handed. However, with advances in science it became clear […]

[Original post on mastodon.world]

I have been thinking a lot about the ubiquitous talk about how genAI 'saves time' and thus 'increases efficiency'.

Here I construct an argument - bound to be controversial but the point is to have a realistic discussion - that humans are 3x more efficient* at writing short emails than ChatGPT4 […]