Lmst

@aliide Nope always thought suspect. Known issues with security - I definitely wouldn't use with Ukrainian or Russian pals https://www.pwnallthethings.com/p/russia-is-spying-on-telegram-chats

Andi Fugard boosted:

if you ramp up the production of information, you need better discernment, because your capacity limitations haven’t just magically increased

without better discernment things will break *even if* the quality of the additional information is high ….

it’s not just “AI slop” that’s a problem, just helping regular scientists to produce more is damaging if we don’t simultaneously provide better tools for discernment (human and technical) - but if anything, we are weakening those (e,g. by de-skilling)….

that’s a disastrous feedback loop in the making…

Andi Fugard boosted:

"In 2018, Palantir hired Mandelson’s lobbying firm, Global Counsel, to facilitate the company’s penetration of UK Government contracts – at the same time Epstein remained an active Valar partner receiving confidential investment opportunities from Thiel’s fund."

https://bylinetimes.com/2026/02/04/jeffrey-epstein-and-peter-thiel-co-owned-venture-fund-as-thiels-palantir-entered-uk-government/

#palantir #peterthiel #thiel #ukpol #mandelson #petermandelson #epstein #jeffreyepstein #epsteinfiles #labour #starmer #news #russia #technews

One of my fav scenes in #TheNightManager

Adam: Tell me, how did you get involved in this sort of thing?

Basil: Oh. Right. University.

Adam: Yeah?

Basil: Recruited by a handsome tutor. Oh, God.

Adam: Did you not think twice, no?

Basil: Not for a second. My therapist would say – if I hadn’t told her I was a dentist – that I am the product of an immigrant family, cursed with a compulsion to impress the natives.

Adam: [laughs] Cheers to that.

@UlrikeHahn mildly edited just now to fix broken links and add their religion (discipline)

@UlrikeHahn I think some similarities with how psych and philosophy define cognition too. Here's a quotation stash: https://andifugard.info/what-is-cognition/

@UlrikeHahn Lots to say on this but alas more thoughts than time! Some quickies - the System/Type 1/2 distinction seems unhelpful when trying to analyse task performance - it's always a bit of both and I reckon more useful to discuss more specific processes (at some comprehensible level of abstraction) like parsing, memory, surface level text heuristics, beliefs, etc. I had a brief digression in my 2009 PhD thesis on this... Personal/subpersonal maybe helps!

Screengrab from a thesis. Key parts: Da Silva Neves, Bonnefon, and Raufaste (2002) write, of a set of properties they hypothesised that reasoners’ inferences ought to satisfy:

"...even if we expect human inference to corroborate these properties, we know
of no sufficient reason to think that lay reasoners would recognize any ratio-
nality postulate as valid, neither that they would conscientiously use them to
guide their reasoning. [...] we assume that human inference is constrained by
knowledge organisation in memory and that its formal properties emerge from
a spreading activation process operating directly on knowledge structures.

Politzer et al. (2006, Footnote 2) write that they "do not test and are not committed to the notion that people have internal representations in the form of Gergonne (1817) diagrams."

Stenning and van Lambalgen (2008, p. 39) write: "Of course we agree that subjects don’t “know these logics” just in the sense that they don’t know the grammar of English, but they do know these logics just in the sense that they do know the grammar of English.”

Andi Fugard boosted:

This is also a major issue on Wikipedia at the moment: Russian trolls have been trying to change the birthplaces of Baltic figures to Estonian/Latvian/Lithuanian SSR — which, if successful, means that Wikipedia is recognising an occupation as legitimate (which major Western nations, including the US, did not even do at the time).

#Wikipedia #wikimedia #wiki #Baltic #Baltics #Estonia #Latvia #Lithuania #russia #russiaUkraineWar #news #ussr #soviet #histodons #UkraineWar

“ LAlIIVILLL LL inAVLUAL a
Author, Dublin, Ireland
Touché from the Balts
ese
The Financial Times, a publication
of based in the former Roman province,
an Anglo-Saxon settlement zone, and a
rm | possession of the Dukes of Normandy,
keeps referring to the Baltic states,
which were occupied by the Soviet
| Union for over 50 years, as “former
re * | Soviet republics” (“Europe already ‘at
e | war with Russia, says Latvia's central
| banker”, Report, January 18).
| Perhaps the FT does not know that
ess- | the UK did not recognise Soviet
bi 3 sovereignty over them and that the
ns | British view is that they were never
ges | Soviet republics. :
| Pfr Sine
leaked y of California, San Diego,
nd Russell on Marx,
hate Glad ow 3%es

Andi Fugard boosted:

new tech warcrime

ppl always complain that the clock on my microwave never shows the right time bcs i cant be assed to set it manually

so now i have an unfuck-microwave.sh cronjob which briefly kills its power every day at midnight

Andi Fugard boosted:

France is ditching Zoom and Microsoft Teams for Visio, its sovereign video platform, across all state administrations by 2027. 🇫🇷💻 Developed by DINUM and hosted on certified French cloud, it boosts security, cuts costs by €1M/year per 100k users, and features AI transcription. A bold digital sovereignty move! https://cyberinsider.com/france-to-replace-zoom-and-teams-with-sovereign-platform-visio/ #DigitalSovereignty #FranceTech #Visio #Newz

@tslumley Sorry in case not clear what I'm going on about - seeing umbrellas tells me it's raining and is useful even though umbrellas don't cause rain. I can use the prediction to tell me to bring a brolly!

Andi Fugard boosted:

Do predictive models need to be causal?
https://notstatschat.rbind.io/2026/01/26/do-predictive-models-need-to-be-causal/

@tslumley My go-to example is looking out the window and seeing umbrellas. But it's relying on a (very informal) causal model and Bayes' rule I guess. Similar for P(diagnosis | test result) from P(test res | diag) and P(diag).

@steamworkgroup Glad you found it interesting - I had to get it off my chest :)

Andi Fugard boosted:

are there any European petitions on banning X over Grok’s CSAM?

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