On the fantasy of masculinity without accountability.

One of the consequences of LLM proliferation is that significantly more academic papers are uploaded to arXiv and submitted to conferences. As the quality of papers drops and their number increases…

In the past we have written about disasters and how one can model peoples reactions to them or how one can mine social media or mobility data to explore people's responses to them. In a new paper…

I read the sanitized version of fairy tales when I was a kid—by which I mean the version of the story where things end mostly happily. The collections of fairy tales that eliminated the more violent…

Introduction William O'Reilly, Nicola Morrison, Rachel Reeves, Anna Lora-Wainwright, Neri Oxman, John Hattie, Susannah Dickinson, Claudine Gay, Jason Arday. All 9 of these people were accused of…

Slowness is the equilibrium state, not a disease. Six ratchet mechanisms, the principles that counter each one, and why your AI summariser is middle management.

Originally published on the MongoDB Research Blog. There’s an arms race in database research. Every year, papers have more and more benchmarks. Researchers are spending more effort, writing…

Introduction A plea to the undecided voter Table Notes Debian LLM GR - Summary of the options Introduction LLMs have finally made it to the ultimate stage of Debian’s governance processes, a…

Tech is an excellent field to be in, as the compensation-to-effort ratio far exceeds virtually all others. I am not aware of any other career that offers a six figure income at such a low barrier of…

New business models emerge in which your shopping experience gets recorded and cut for social media money.

In a previous post, I argued that AI is becoming a company operating system layer. The natural next question is how to tell whether that is actually happening inside a company. The answer is not how…

Gen AI, as you know, can produce polished steps faster than most of us can find the answer key. For students, this can make learning something new even trickier. Try the ACE framework.

For as long as I can recall, there's been a 'thing' in parts of the UK – honesty boxes. As part of our (once) high trust society, people put their 'wares' – whether that be cakes,…

  Consent to Waltz, Capacity to Tango, Connect to.. using statin and antihypertensive examples shows how we on one side and our doctors on the other can get blindsided by treatment and end up…

I have run my first CRA Survival Bootcamps and learned a lot: manufacturers of white-labelled products, manual updates, opt-outs from automatic updates, taming the CVE flood with CVSS metrics and how…

I can audit a model's output on leadership and must take its tax advice on faith. That asymmetry is the whole problem, and it is not psychological. The third essay in the Prior Obligations series…

Imagine you're staring at your 11th AI-generated pull request of the morning. The code looks ... fine. The description is polished. Bullet points, a clear rationale, tests, and updated docs. But when…

Epistemic status: Obviously speculative but mechanism design is fun. Last year I wrote a post on reward hacking as we were then beginning to see concerning signs of scaling RLVR causing models to…

Most “greenest cities” lists measure the wrong things, and I believe the 3-30-300 rule offers a better way to measure how green a city really is.

Every workflow ships two artifacts: the result, and a versioned improvement to the system that produced it. - A rule with no enforcement is a wish. Palantir’s AI FDE, the agent that builds apps…

Recently, the Jacobian Conjecture was disproven by a counterexample discovered by an LLM. Shortly thereafter, a ChatGPT session from mathematician Terence Tao made the rounds online. In his chat, Tao…

Last month, a Brown professor wrote about discovering that a majority of his students had used AI to cheat on his take-home exam. He was irate about this “scandal,” despite the university seemingly…

You are not immune to advertising. It’s through no fault of your own, either. Advertisers figured out quite some time ago that natural sounding promotion from people that viewers are familiar…

My impressions about Abusado, a detailed and immersive portrait of Santa Marta and the story of Marcinho VP.

Possibly the longest blog post title evvvveeeer! One of the main things I do for work is manage the Green Web Dataset , a public dataset of website hosting and infrastructure providers who have…

AI-Assisted programming has added certain words and phrases to my technical vocabulary. Some of these are fine, most of them make me wince. They are, however, useful when talking to a clanker. All…

Developers showed up on my MR with an AI doing the review in their place. The ones who removed code review altogether are almost more honest, because they saw it had lost the race. What remains is…

GitHub’s down again today, so I think I’ll spend the time moving to a self-hosted Forge. I’ve long been an advocate for decentralizing software development, but over the years it…

My experience fixing my Framework 13" laptop with AMD 7060 series that was bricked due to a failed BIOS update with US$20 worth of tools, instead of replacing the motherboard as suggested by…

If you've ever been reorg'd and thought "this is bullshit," guess what? You were probably right.The "Planning to Plan" thing always kills meIn a 2013 McKinsey survey of…

On competition for resources in MMOs: mechanical and social implications, and the creation of lasting memory

In February 1949, Harper’s published the essay “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” by its managing editor, Russell Lynes. There, he observed a new structure determining prestige in the…

Lance has posted about his, and around 160 others, being laid off from IIT here .(IIT stands for Illinois Institute of Technology which is where Lance was employed.) Hence I looked into what is…

Poisoning Our Children draws on nearly a half million words of interviews with experts, advocates, and families. Many of these are already published, but it has been a while, so I have decided to…

#AI #Wikipedia #misinformation #POPIA #OnyxAudit At 09:47 UTC on 12 August 2026, someone rewrote the English Wikipedia biography of Sam Altman to say he had been assassinated in Seattle that morning.…

There’s a kind of shift occurring beneath software development right now. It has now become almost trivial to spin up a project that I wouldn’t have had time for not so long ago. I wrote…

I had two immediate reactions to the news of Jason Arday’s apparent suicide. The first was sadness, especially for his two children, wife, and parents. The second was to start a countdown to…

How a road could change West Africa’s urban future Kasoa is a snapshot of how unplanned urbanization is unfolding in the region. Its population growth is far outpacing the creation of new roads…

Sarah Elaine Eaton reflects on Dr. Jason Arday's case amid personal grief over the recent loss of her brother. While acknowledging the public scrutiny surrounding Arday's resignation from Cambridge…

My weekly Claude Fable limit resets every Tuesday. I usually work through it in a day or two, then I have to wait again. So I’ve noticed myself saving up more ambitious asks the rest of the week,…

✨ In This Edition ✨ 📟 Short-Form Content: On many, many leaks - of credentials, unpublished games, and entire passports; being ""opted in"" to chatbot activities; and on having the robot create a…

People increasingly want radical remedy, and need a radical vision. Pearls before swine, and disrupting the dominant scripts.

A great TED talk by Jerome Hunter rejecting toxic masculinity by nipping it in the bud with our youth Confidence - rooted in a deep sense of self over achievements Communication - avoid stifling int

Open source is one of the greatest things that has happened in tech, you're telling me I can use this piece of software, for free, in any way, shape, or form, and still get access to it's source code…

AI agents are entering a software delivery system built around human speed, judgment, and accountability. The next SDLC needs machine-readable context, enforceable limits, reproducible environments,…

I haven't seen an AD on YouTube in at least a decade with various forms of ad-block, most recently Adguard on my router and uBlock Origin on all of my devices.So why do people pay for YouTube…

When Accountability Goes Rogue💡I recently spoke with Dr. Zena Assaad for her podcast, Responsible Bytes. Video is above, below is an essay adapted from the conversation. "The system from…

The Slaughtered Ox, Rembrandt (1655) More than once, an otherwise smart person has attempted to untie the Gordian knot that is the way we treat animals, and themselves come undone in the process.…

I'm excited to be heading to Billund on September 29th for a panel debate at [AFTRYK Festival](https://www.aftrykfestival.dk), billed as Denmark's first cross-disciplinary festival for students and…

A room can lose oxygen when authority asks for deference before it has accepted burden, but the allergy to counterfeit authority can become its own vanity.