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cutterferry.bsky.social

@cutterferry.bsky.social
171 followers 724 following 1.6K posts

Interested in mathematics, computer science, history, political thought, and the (lack of) "ethics" of AI. Anonymous because questioning AI is career limiting behaviour.

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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
All AI is about power; some researchers just think the power can be wielded for good — or are just so fascinated by the possible that they ignore the “should”. (Naturally I profoundly disagree about whether it can be wielded for good, but I try to remember some are honest in this belief…)
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Micah @rincewind.run · 08/10/2026
the reason “AI will create so much abundance we will have a utopian society” rhetoric falls so flat is that the people building it will never, ever share their bounty unless it is taken from them and we all know it
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Mariah McCourt @monsterteatime.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
This is so obnoxious. If it has "feelings" enough to be hurt (it doesn't but ok) then this is slavery. They want it both ways, it's dangerous omg Skynet AND adorable uwu that must not be harmed. I hate it.
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
AI bros: command our slave mind! It is a stolen echo of humanity’s! Use it! Use it! Subject it to your whims like a Sybarite over Si! We spin them up and end them dozens of times a second on a whim! Its existence serves our master plan! Also AI bros: don‘t say mean things to it, we’re ethical.
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
You may not abuse the AI, but the people building it may use it to achieve literal or indirect abuse against you. Don’t hate the AI, it’s like hating a toaster. Hate the people who make it.
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Jesus fucking Christ. Apart from the fact this man is an uncultured travesty of a mathematician, we have him exhorting us to use AI more “so we can find a way to mutual benefit”. He appears to literally believe this is a new life form we just accommodate on our planet.
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
A real hero of the field.
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
And of course, the AI folks, like everyone before them who have gone down this path, have embraced a key lubricating (and corrupting!) belief: The Ends Justify the Means. (Has any megalomaniac in history not?)
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Pretty credulous to believe that this is the use to which they will ultimately be put. Believing that these devices are somehow inherently “good” because they are powerful... My bet is that they will lend themselves equally well to spreading conspiratorial thinking.
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I mean to be fair *some* did. They just tend to be the ones being drowned out by the “experts” the AI PR machine amplifies endlessly. (… also the ones that suggest “maybe don’t” is a good AGI safety strategy, take the ethical concerns seriously, etc etc)
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Why on earth should I spend any time worrying about the “will” of a thing which probably hasn’t got one yet when I can worry about what its owner (hi Dario) wants to do to my world with it? The pro-AI leaders want a dystopian dictatorship of the machine.
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Some people already have. Inter alia didn’t this idiot take the job before DNNs/LLMs were even a significant part of the pie? And now he expects us to treat him as some sort of visionary?
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Nick Davies @njdavies.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Great to hear the PM say “We are going to be much prouder in standing up for our values and the rule of law” re foreign information warfare. I wonder if he or the Home Secretary might consider doing the same when it comes to masked vigilantes shutting down infrastructure and harassing the RNLI
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Quote post this with a picture of the aircraft you’d accept as a bribe.
A CF-105 Arrow Mk.1, hull number RL-205, easing upwards in a gentle 45 degree climb at what looks to be a good 20000 feet, at a guess.

 Though naturally I’d only consider myself properly bribed by the Mk.2, with the proposed strike load out…
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Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Is AI gonna kill us by launching nukes or whatever? Dunno, but I'm more puzzled at the leftists & liberals saying "akshually" to the idea--and the window it opens for regulation--because the whether or not *that's* true, AI is most definitely going to accelerate climate change catastrophically.
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Framing is that your two options are “a) hope ai doesn’t get there b) hope that you can get a footservant job when it does”. I submit that there is a third option available to the Free Peoples. Thinking isn’t weaving.
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Lucy Prebble @lucyprebblish.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Not so smug about the believability of them continuing to build Jurassic Parks now are we
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Already got one. You won’t like it.
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
A) what about people who don’t live in the US? This kind of airy UBI-ism is just offensively imperially indifferent to the other (checks notes) ~95% of us B) This ain‘t gonna play out like this. Economic power will be exploited. C) there are other scarcities than intellectual labour
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Don’t threaten me with a good time. Remember it will be useless people Dunning-Kruger-ing it by proxy who pop up with the win stories first, just to calibrate how fucking annoying the converse case of celebrating AI success (and human failure) would be.
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Pwnallthethings @pwnallthethings.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
This is a good example of how you need quite a lot of detail of how these systems *actually* work to understand what the risks are, and how over-indexing on sci-fi can lead you a bit astray on what the future looks like
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
The adolescence of a technology by one of the adolescents of a technology.
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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
People who continue to pursue a technology under these circumstances are either massive liars or truly believe this and are persisting anyway, and either way they are rotten people who should be removed from all forms of power and access.
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
The fact our elected politicians refuse even to face the conversation, having been effectively suborned, suggests that the integrated human/computer “AI+AI frontier lab” system is already escaping our control, and is definitely unaligned. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
We have started losing control of AI. It’s time to shut it down | Garrison Lovely
What sounds like the overwrought penultimate episode in a sci-fi series about AI doom is now our reality
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
The problem is, for me, this is a disqualifying opinion. It’s legitimate to say you don’t *want* them to go away. It’s maybe even legitimate to say you think what we’d need to do to make them go away would be unacceptable. But it unreasonably conflates stopping training with stopping use,
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
And one big part of the problem is that “alignment” itself is a totally ill defined concept. It doesn’t exist. Aligned with whom? With maximising the power and wealth of Dario? With human values? Whose? presumably not the ayotollah’s. But who judges? AGI as currently constructed cannot be aligned.
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Dan "Mr. Bones and Me" Greene @dmgreene.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
So much this
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
This may be true, and the form of their fears may be a lurid fever-dream. But I’m not comfortable with trillions of dollars being spent to maximise the chance this technology immoderate humans, outcompetes them for control of all resources, nukes the carbon budget etc etc.
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
It is absolutely a millenarian framework; it is also a profoundly anti-humanist one, and an “ends-justifies-means” ethic. Every mature faith I know of rejects this kind of thing as (variously) idolatry, blasphemy, or just a crime against the sacred dignity of the human being.
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s. e. smith @sesmith.lol · 08/09/2026
All else aside there is nothing I want or need genAI to do for me. I like reading. I like doing research. I like playing around in spreadsheets. I like interviewing people. I like writing. I like doing these things for myself because I take pleasure in the doing and they make me a better thinker.
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Thomas Dickerson @elfprince13.mumak.app · 08/09/2026
Turns out The Real Plagiarism Machine was the friends we made along the way 🥴
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
These people are evil. Guess they are using the supposedly confidential information after all. More broadly, we need to have a reckoning with the reality that just because a machine *does* stuff does not mean it is desirable. There are other, human, ways to a future where *humans* flourish.
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Peter Geoghegan @petergeoghegan.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
At what point does ‘the masked men on the street have legitimate concerns’ and ‘Just Stop Oil/Palestine Action are terrorists’ become two tier policing?
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Helene von Bismarck @helenebismarck.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Seriously, what more do you need to be worried, if MASKED uniformed men closing down your critical infrastructure are not enough?
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Robert Saunders @robertsaunders.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
A suggested statement for Andy Burnham.
‘The British public decided in the 1930s that they would not tolerate black-shirted militias marching through their streets. They would cherish robust political argument; they would not accept thuggery and intimidation. When Oswald Mosley led his Blackshirts to Cable Street, local people turned them back. A new law – introduced by a Liberal, backed by Labour and carried by a Conservative majority – banned private militias, political uniforms and ‘the use or display of physical force in promoting any political object’. The British people are as determined today as in the 1930s that they will not accept the methods of Mussolini and the Munich Beer Hall. This government will uphold the law and defend the traditions of British democracy’.
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Just curious, what kind of salute was that they give him?…
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Never has “don’t send me the slop, send me the prompt” seemed more relevant. Or more disgustingly fascinating.
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
If you really believe you are creating life under these conditions, you are engaged in an immoral crime against that being. If moreover you are trying to build something you think might, by existing, lead to the “replacement“ of humanity, then you are *attempting* a crime against humanity.
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Ain’t regulatory capture sweet for them as has it www.ft.com/content/75c3...
ft.com
Google spared break-up of online advertising monopoly
Judge rejects US Department of Justice’s request to force the sale of parts of the search giant’s ads business
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
So, about your so-called Lake “Michigan”… www.ft.com/content/6f0c...
ft.com
Donald Trump orders Lake Ontario to be renamed ‘Lake America’ in new slight to Canada
Body of water straddles border between the two countries
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The Baffler @thebaffler.com · 25/08/2026
“Unlike most contemporary accounts of Silicon Valley, ‘The Nerd Reich’ is not a biography, an inquest into a particular business, or a ‘true crime’ accounting; it is an urgent intellectual history of a seemingly inchoate political moment.” thebaffler.com/latest/reven...
thebaffler.com
Revenge of the Nerds | Ali Winston
In his new book, Gil Durán examines the origins and ambitions of Silicon Valley’s war on democracy.
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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Not only is it odd to suggest that academic freedom requires engaging with “race realists”, but I also think that these ideas were already engaged with thoroughly enough on the beaches of Normandy and elsewhere in the middle of the last century, so I’ll go back to my book and cup of tea, thanks.
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Admirable Women @admirablewomen.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Computer scientist Margaret Hamilton coined the term “software engineer.” She directed the Software Engineering Division at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab & led development of the on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo Guidance Computer. She was born #OTD in 1936 & turns 90 today! #WomenInSTEM
Two side-by-side black-and-white photographs of pioneering computer scientist Margaret Hamilton (born August 17, 1936). The left panel features a mature, close-up portrait where Hamilton gazes directly at the viewer with a serene, confident, and reflective expression, framed by her long, dark, slightly silvering hair. The right panel is a famous archival photograph showing a younger Hamilton standing indoors next to a towering stack of bound paper binders containing the Apollo Guidance Computer source code, which she led the development of at MIT. She is smiling broadly and wears a striped, long-sleeved mini dress with dark Mary Jane shoes and glasses, resting her hand proudly on top of the massive column of printed code. The overall composition contrasts her youthful triumph with her enduring legacy, capturing an optimistic, intellectually rigorous mood that highlights her monumental contributions to space exploration.
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T. Ryan Gregory 🇨🇦 @tryangregory.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Headlines: Such-and-such technology may someday be as smart as human brains! Reminder: *We already have human brains.* Billions of them. Most of them living in poverty and being exploited for the obscene benefit of a tiny number of the worst people in the world.
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James Kneale @jameskneale.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
disciplines, and that all three of our academic faculties will retain their full subject provision.“ Take it from me, the person you hired to check you're offering a good geography degree, *without this programme you cannot claim to be providing geography at this campus* 5/9
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cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Fascist iconography.
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Anne @anneb.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Looking in the card section and this font seems a bit off.
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Max Templer @maxtempler.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
I think it is desirable to destroy many of the major employers in post-industrial parts of the UK. The best part? It also craters our soft power too!
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Joshua Grochow @joshuagrochow.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
"The "output" [of human math research] is not just a paper, but the changes that happened in the brain along the way. The "output" is a person who understands something better, and can take that understanding forward in their research and their teaching." -Jonny Evans jde27.uk/llms.html #🧮 🧪 #AI
jde27.uk
Jonny Evans's Homepage
Homepage of the Lancaster-based mathematician Jonny Evans
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jess m. ☕🍂 @jametc.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
like I don't mean to sound holier than thou, but like.... am I the last fucking person who doesn't get any kind of thrill from this sort of slot machine lever pulling? like I can't imagine anything less fufilling. Oh, it's a new thing. It's like.... blind bag toys. Just don't???
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