Sign in

My Kicks

@hikemix.bsky.social
640 followers 359 following 572 posts

Philosopher in Glasgow, working on laws of nature, physics, and artificial intelligence. Researching bullshit but not a bullshitter.

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by My Kicks
Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 12h
Just gonna repost this: You can’t “prove” anything isn’t conscious — a plant, a rock, your iPhone — but even without deeply understanding the nature of consciousness, we can say there’s no good reason to expect it to correlate with what LLMs are good at. juliansanchez.substack.com/p/dont-fall-...
juliansanchez.substack.com
Don't Fall in Love With Your Toaster
A quick argument about AI consciousness
814121
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 16h
She didn't claim that Will, she was responding to the claim that you have to use something to understand it. It's an obviously false claim and csam and heroin are counterexamples to it. She's not claiming that these are ethically equivalent to AI.
010
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 16h
Actually Will, research shows that using LLMs impairs your ability to focus and engage on difficult tasks. That's a harm some of us want to avoid. news.berkeley.edu/2026/10/09/u...
news.berkeley.edu
Study explores how AI use affects performance on math and reasoning tasks - Berkeley News
A UC Berkeley researcher co-authored a study that raises profound questions about how we interact with artificial intelligence in education — and daily life.
110
Reposted by My Kicks
Jamison Foser @jamisonfoser.bsky.social · 14/10/2026
this is so obviously correct it is deeply bizarre and corrosive how many people who should know better are unwilling to simply say it
213124517
Reposted by My Kicks
Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 21h
A very interesting collection of reactions to the OpenAI results.
proofsandprompts.com
100+ reactions to 100+ solutions
“Many of us are grappling with OpenAI’s announcement on 6 October. We feel that it is useful to have an updating snapshot of the community’s gut feeling.”
176
Reposted by My Kicks
Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 14/10/2026
sorry, what?
Blue Origin might not have had a supply chain, but it did have a cosmology. Bezos “is God at Blue Origin,” Alexandra Abrams said. “Jeff’s big message was that it’s too late for climate-change efforts on Earth, and we need to be able to leave. We need to sustainably go into space and build resources, have a base on the moon, which would act as a gas station to the rest of the solar system. At the company, everyone felt like we were saving humanity.”
96754145
Reposted by My Kicks
Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 14/10/2026
My heart breaks for mathematicians whose lives and careers are being destroyed by AI — and especially this PhD student, who doesn’t even know he is a poet
Kai Shaikh, a Ph.D. student in mathematics at the University of Toronto, also currently at SLMath, observed that theorems are easy to use as benchmarks, but that they capture little of the wonderment at the heart of math. "Just like a photograph of a mile marker can't provide much of the value of actually going on a hike," he said,
"it would seem to me that proofs without stories, or even stories without struggle or mystery, and first glimpses of strange beasts, are not very meaningful or valuable to us humans."
6970341429
Reposted by My Kicks
Aspharon @asph.me · 10/10/2026
dont make me tap the sign
tumblr post by carbomcoco

"these researchers published a paper on something that literally any of us could have told you 🙄" ok well my supervisors wont let me write something in my thesis unless I can back it up with a citation so maybe it's a good thing that they're amplifying your voice to the scientific community in a way that prevents people from writing off your experiences as annecdotal evidence
they did the research in the first place because they believed you and wanted to tell people about it. they are not our enemies.

reblog by aphony-cree

people always go "Instead of spending all that time on a study they could have just listened to us when we said these thing happen"

they did listen, that's how studies work, they asked people about their experiences and put all the data together in a nice package that can be cited
539851621
Reposted by My Kicks
Ilhan Omar @ilhanmn.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
I’m ok. Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced.
14784975411678
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
That's why they were persecuted by the puritans.
060
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Ahh yes but the Quakers did leave England for religious freedom.
150
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
This statement is an embarrassment. The leadership should fully back Omar. It's the right move politically: polls show "the state of our democracy" is 2nd only to the economy in importance for voters. Make a big contrast, emphasize Trump admin corruption & authoritarianism! And do the right thing!
000
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
in order to figure out if that kind of model applies you would have to do a lot of empirical (eg not maths) work. This kind of thinking is what worries me about "AI can solve anything with enough compute"
110
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
yeah but what kind of idiot thinks you can use Lean to check a model of cancer
170
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
our Lord
000
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
I don't know what you mean. Lots of software is nondeterministic in the way. The randomness in training and output is determined by random number generators the same way it is in every other peice of software.
030
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
If you program a machine to act randomly you are still responsible for what it does
0120
Reposted by My Kicks
François Guité @francoisguite.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things | University of California Berkeley news.berkeley.edu/2026/10/09/u... AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance | arXiv arxiv.org/abs/2604.04721 #freeaccess
02011
Reposted by My Kicks
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
either it is in principle possible to set up appropriate safeguards (in which case the "AI alignment" story is just as much about who gets to set them up and enforce them as it is about the content of the safeguards) or it is not (in which case we should be talking about transnational moratoria)
1138472
Reposted by My Kicks
Coach Finstock @coachfinstock.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
To wit. They're already doing it. "Acting on their own". Nope, that's not a thing
613618
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
What's surprising is that in many areas the report (as a whole) seems to equate working on 'politically charged' topics with a decline in quality and rigor. But of course there's always the possibility that increasing rigor requires working on politically charged topics!
061
Reposted by My Kicks
Brian Weatherson @bweatherson.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
I get that Western Australia has punched above its weight in producing high quality music over the years, but I don't think it's fair to describe the rest of us as part of the periphery.
161
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
How is Kit Fine at all qualified to evaluate the state of Music Studies???
020
Reposted by My Kicks
Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 07/10/2026
Terry Tao @teorth.bsky.social: Indiscriminate brute-force application of AI to mathematics is depleting the field of good questions without renewing this resource or providing commensurate value. OpenAI: We hear you. Here's a .zip file with 377 hasty AI solutions to important open problems.
nytimes.com
OpenAI Releases Findings on 377 Math Problems, Further Roiling Field (Gift Article)
After a previous solution angered mathematicians, the company characterized the new release as being more responsive to concerns about A.I. disrupting research.
19417121
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
My paper 'A Practitioner's Guide to Pragmatic Humeanism' just dropped on Philosopher's Imprint. In it I provide a minimal model of the role of laws of nature in our practices of predicting the future. It's got pictures! It's open access! journals.publishing.umich.edu/phimp/articl...
journals.publishing.umich.edu
A Practitioner's Guide to Pragmatic Humeanism
All Humeans hold, roughly, that laws are informative summaries of non-lawful matters of fact. Pragmatic Humeans go further: for them, what makes these summaries the laws is their usefulness to agents ...
051
Reposted by My Kicks
toilet bones @toiletbones.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Found the email I sent when I got accidentally added to the faculty listserv of an orthopedic surgery clinic and nobody would remove me so I sent this email to all faculty/staff/med students and they removed me almost immediately
Hello Bone Colleagues, 
I have invented a new type of ankle and I'm very excited to show it to you. Early raccoon trials suggest a 60% increase in scurrying speed and dramatic increases in fine motor banditry. I know we are not supposed to create super raccoons, but I think you'll change your mind and professional ethics when you see how cute they are. I believe we are on the cusp of a new era in advanced human scurrying because if medical science has taught me anything, it's that improvements in raccoons correspond 1:1 to improvements in humans. 

--
[My name]
Chief Bone Inventor
Chair, Department of Foot and Leg Innovation
Lord Mayor, Musculoskeletal Medicine 
Hartford HealthCare,
The Bone & Joint Institute at Hartford Hospital.
193115273133
Reposted by My Kicks
Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
ProPublica has made a database of all the incidents they could find where ICE detained citizens. Important work. This kind of data is too often hidden and lost.
0214118
Reposted by My Kicks
kat excellence ✨ @katexcellence.io · 31/08/2026
this was difficult to read, but it's important to know people are currently in prison for 50+ years for attending a protest + one wasn't even at the protest, but got sentenced for 30 years for "concealing" anarchist zines
motherjones.com
How anti-ICE protesters became prisoners in Trump's war on antifa
“We are not terrorists.”
161272790
Reposted by My Kicks
Andrea @valkyrie.hacker.gf · 06/10/2026
This is getting distinctly into "the punishment for being late is death; the punishment for rebelling against the emperor is also death" territory
02914
Reposted by My Kicks
Coach Finstock @coachfinstock.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Not an exaggeration. Why do you not highlight this stuff CONSTANTLY
510225
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
half a tank of diesel
000
Reposted by My Kicks
Nicholas Slayton @nslayton.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
What. What?! WHAT?!?! futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
Trump Was Reportedly Pushed Into Invading Venezuela by Conversation With Grok
Trump reportedly consulted with Grok for hours on his next course of action in Venezuela before launching a military invasion.
40511157
Reposted by My Kicks
Edouard Machery @edouardmachery.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Absolutely - the media do the same as I noted about @npr.org The Middle.
041
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
There's something distressingly reminiscent of Ender's Game in the way the world order is at risk due to some early computer messageboard nerds who got it wrong.
000
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Chatgpt speak too
000
Reposted by My Kicks
Robert Saunders @robertsaunders.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The ability to pour hundreds of millions of pounds into a loss-making TV channel, bent on wrenching British politics sharply to the right, is yet another of the ways in which extreme wealth is trying to remake UK democracy. It needs to be part of any serious conversation about political funding.
541904772
Reposted by My Kicks
depths of wikipedia @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The Phantom of Heilbronn, also referred to as the Woman Without a Face, was a presumed female serial killer whose existence was inferred from DNA evidence found at 40 crime scenes across Austria, France and Germany from 1993 to 2009.

In March 2009, investigators concluded that the supposed serial killer did not exist, and the DNA belonged to a woman who worked at a factory that made the cotton swabs used for collecting DNA samples
4853311255
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Ah, so Biden knew how evil the policy was and *chose* to do nothing.
030
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The Wildmans new album is also pretty great.
000
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
There's been a lot of really good country that's not pop country in the past few years, with cool albums by Tyler Childers and Sturgill Simpson. I've also been enjoying some more old-time influenced folks like Johanna Wacker and Angela Autumn.
110
Reposted by My Kicks
Noah Berlatsky @nberlat.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Rhiannon Giddens and Billy Strings both have great country albums out this year. I think Choosin' Texas is a pleasant song. I like a ton of past country music (including a bunch of songs I include in the piece there.)
191
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
9 games that express my soul--or at least my upbringing.
A 3 x 3 block of images of video game covers, from the top left: Fantasy General, Link's Awakening, Resident Evil 4, Age of Wonders, Baldur's Gate II, Super Smash Brothers, Mario Maker 2, Baldur's Gate III, Zelda Breath of the Wild.
000
Reposted by My Kicks
rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
right, yes. one of the basic problems is that they think that thinking about something really hard is a type of sampling, and that you actually don't need to sample anything to get information, and that there is no difference between thinking about something and doing it.
1650248
Reposted by My Kicks
Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
this is kinda key to their level of concern about AGI, actually. they think a large enough pile of well-organized compute can skip all the experimental steps between "wanting to kill all humans" and "actually doing that"
326419
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I tried to explain this languistic variation to the owner of this beer store but he couldn't stop laughing.
"It's Dogg'n It" announces the sign for this unusually named Pittsburgh area beer distributor
000
Reposted by My Kicks
Center for PhilSci @center4philsci.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Visit our calendar for more information about this week's events. #philsci www.centerphilsci.pitt.edu/events
083
Reposted by My Kicks
Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I am now keeping this on speed-dial
Edited old IBM printout in black caps on off-white paper.
'A computer can never be held accountable
Therefore a computer must always do the hacking haha what are they gonna do, put a computer in jail? Haha "oops it's alive" lmao'
81101321
My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Isn't Fleabag a comedy? I laughed.
000