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jhirwin.bsky.social

@jhirwin.bsky.social
47 followers 87 following 16 posts
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Reposted by @jhirwin.bsky.social
ve, the ghost of info past @vortexegg.com · 17h
The widespread cultural performance of autonomized systems as having independent agency from their operators is also a form of cultural technical illiteracy; one that is incredibly dangerous for organizations and institutions to let their professional staff carry on with.
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Jacquelyn Gill @jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 16h
Aaron Swartz, coding prodigy and hacktivist who helped develop RSS and was a co-founder of Reddit, died by suicide after facing $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison for felony charges, just for downloading pdfs of research papers with the intention of making them accessible to the public.
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Greg Pak @gregpak.net · 15h
Destroy this company, pls.
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Paul Crider @paulcrider.liberalcurrents.com · 13/10/2026
This bill would abolish ICE, DHS, and CBP, transferring legitimate customs duties to other departments. It would sunset Section 219 of the INA close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility and shutter all immigration detention centers. You have my sword, milady.
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Truthout @truthout.org · 13/10/2026
Rep. Delia C. Ramirez has introduced a bill that would abolish not just ICE, but the DHS altogether, repealing the 2002 law establishing the agency and replacing it with one focused on protecting civil and human rights.
truthout.org
Rep. Delia Ramirez Introduces Landmark Bill to Abolish DHS, ICE, and CBP
The Department of Homeland Security was established in 2002 as part of the Bush administration’s war on terror.
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Evan Bernick, a finite mode with a smol hooman and a lorg floof @evanbernick.bsky.social · 14/10/2026
I am entirely serious when I say that this should be seen as a moderate position. It specifically and surgically dismantles institutions that did not exist pre-9/11 and assigns their functions much as they were assigned pre-9/11.
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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
This isn't a case of abusing some loophole or misusing discretionary authority. The law is unambiguous and he's breaking it, simple as that. If Congress isn't going to do anything about breaking the law that already exists, passing another law to make it double-illegal accomplishes nothing.
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 11/10/2026
Like if the models are sOoOoO dangerous and prone to going rogue all the time and superhuman hackers and potentially misaligned, why are you letting it do anything at all without direct supervision? Why can it access a single website or execute a single line of code without human review?
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 09/10/2026
Anyway it doesn't mean reward hacking isn't a real phenomenon; it just exists completely outside of the model and mostly corresponds to "model doesn't work". But it has the pleasant side effect of making it sound like the reason it doesn't work is because you actually made the model TOO smart
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Asher HELLbein @asherelbein.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
But that's the thing: I don't believe that these people actually care about the ethics of AI personhood. It is because they know the robots aren't people that they feel safe wringing their hands over their personhood. Real people? Eh. They require stuff from you
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Asher HELLbein @asherelbein.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
It's flatly obscene for Elon Musk to be talking about cruelty to robots when he is personally, singlehandedly and gleefully responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. (And, not to put too fine a point on it, when he thinks nothing of dressing those robots up as sex slaves for him)
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 09/10/2026
nationalize everything Elon Musk owns.
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Ghostly Bree @mostlybree.kitrocha.com · 08/10/2026
I'm actively enraged that everyone allows them to just go around saying this shit like they shouldn't go directly to jail for unthinkable crimes if any of it is true and also go directly to jail for unthinkable fraud if it's not.
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Ghostly Bree @mostlybree.kitrocha.com · 08/10/2026
I don't believe they are conscious but I also don't believe you should get to do interviews where you say "idk man our business model might be built on enslaving sentient creatures" and still get to be a business.
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Katherine Alejandra Cross @quinnae.com · 08/10/2026
To do this through a dissociative medium that already trains us to think of its contents as less real. As so much entertainment. So much content. It is not merely immoral, but the screaming, atavistic *absence* of morality--not coincidentally this defines Hegseth's entire approach to the Pentagon.
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Will Thorne @wbthorne.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
What rent control features matter most? Curious about exploring the rent control literature yourself? You can try for yourself here: wbthorne.com/evidence.html
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John Brown’s Body @berndtpetersen.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
So “why not add it to humanity’s understanding?” begs the question. A machine-checkable certificate has been added to humanity’s archive. Whether it has been added to human understanding is precisely the issue. Proof is not merely certification; mathematics is not merely a database of truths.
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John Brown’s Body @berndtpetersen.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Mathematics is not merely a database of true propositions. It is also a human epistemic practice: proofs organize concepts, expose dependencies, supply explanations, train intuition, generate methods, and create the common intellectual ground from which further mathematics is done.
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Walker Bragman @walkerbragman.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The article notes that Makary drew “strong applause” for saying “The real battle is not between left versus right. It’s between people who are lying to you and people who are trying to tell you the truth.” But that’s NOT true: The destruction of public health is a right-wing project.
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FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) @fairmediawatch.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
"Who Are the Houthis?": Establishment media keep asking the same question, but they aren't giving many answers. fair.org/home/corpora...
fair.org
Corporate Media Don’t Understand the Houthis—and Don’t Want You to, Either
Corporate media see one thing above all that anyone needs to know about the Houthis: They are simply proxies of Iran, the West’s current favorite enemy.
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Eric Blair @protecttruth.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
America’s biggest political problem is rightwing billionaires
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Mae Nick Phra Khanong @nickjbrumfield.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Seriously just enforce normal liability for AI on the owners and so much of this shit goes away AI companies want to be treated like the hired expert when it comes to pocketing any financial flows, but like a cursory Google Search whenever it comes to liability
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Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com · 25/09/2026
I have blamed The agents That hacked Your website And which You probably Reasonably thought I controlled Forgive me I am rich And unaccustomed To taking responsibility
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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 25/09/2026
ai doesn't "hallucinate" it's structurally indifferent to truth ai doesn't give people "ai psychosis" it automates cult dynamics it's a bullshit engine that makes people go auto cult
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Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I feel like if Sam Altman was criminally charged under CFAA they would figure out a way to stop doing crimes all the time
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 24/09/2026
Leaving a bomb with a timer in a building doesn't get reported as "bomb tries to blow up building", and OpenAI's employees designing an extremely clumsy, badly designed self-prompting language model hooked up to public actions that can cause harm shouldn't be reported that way either
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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 20/09/2026
One weird trick
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Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 19/09/2026
I promise you there would be no AI alignment problem if the CEOs of AI companies faced jail time if their AI killed anyone.
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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 19/09/2026
As Robert Tappan Morris was convicted for!
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Philip N Cohen @philipncohen.com · 14/09/2026
One thing that irritates me is the idea that "China" moving ahead on AI is somehow supposed to be bad for "us", as if Anthropic and OpenAI and X and Meta and Google in any way represent or are accountable to any nation. They don't serve our government, they own it.
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 12/09/2026
The Bostrom story has this weird dichotomy where “intelligence” operates over this incredibly rich and nuanced space such that the AI can predict and optimize over the full open universe, but “final goals” are specified in these blunt Midas-like terms like “maximize paperclips”.
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 13/09/2026
I feel like the whole “pace” thing takes this teleological view of AI progress towards some known eventual state of “superintelligence” whereas the way models act is actually highly contingent on the specific choices that the labs make, like intentionally making them carry out supply chain attacks.
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 10/09/2026
"Perhaps we want AI systems to be tested by independent evaluators, and for companies to be held accountable if their AI products are not safe and do not operate as intended, either due to negligence on part of the company or due to training that promotes unintended behavior."
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 10/09/2026
"But what if we imagine a future in which we, the public, actually have some agency and get a say in what kind of AI we want in our lives? What would we want to happen?"
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Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com · 07/09/2026
You can tell this is true because when Michelle Obama made healthy eating and exercise her issue as First Lady, this same movement failed to coalesce around her and in fact she met a ton of resistance from the same people who made RFK Jr possible
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Andréa Ros @apocalypsecarousel.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Mamdani bans AI from the classroom. Beginning this fall, the nation's largest public school system will impose a 1-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI from 2-K-8th grade, covering more than half-million grade school children. Companion chatbots will be banned for students of ALL ages.
Split image Mayor Mamdani speaking on NYC Public Schools vs a robot holding a pointer in front of a chalkboard with a child drawing of the NYC skyline.
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Andrew Lilley Brinker @alilleybrinker.com · 31/08/2026
Hey @1password.bsky.social, time to change course.
alilleybrinker.com
1Password Supports the Ethnic Cleansing of Europe — Andrew Lilley Brinker
1Password has committed $300,000 to Omarchy. This is unacceptable and must be rescinded.
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Nash @radiodeadair.com · 29/08/2026
Nope. There is no animus. You're playing with an automated algorithm that's being assigned too many privileges with outcomes based on probability. That's like "shit I lost control of this giant bolder I was rolling down a crowded street, it must be magic."
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jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · 26/08/2026
just wild that every large US university was doing mccarthy redux, islamophobia flavor, and these people were silent. a white supremacist postdoc in europe gets suspended? TO ARMS, MEN!
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☀️ Jon Schwarz ☀️ @schwarz.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
"This unfortunate race...have by their unexpected desertion & ferocious barbarities justified extermination" That was Thomas Jefferson. It's funny/"funny" how US rhetoric about American Indians was exactly the same as Israeli rhetoric about Palestinians. founders.archives.gov/documents/Je...
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Tim Price @timprice.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
I would never say clanker because that is giving these things too much credit for having a physical existence with which to make noise
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ellie lockhart (she/they) @eleanor.lockhart.contact · 25/08/2026
and I'll also admit that the past decade has actually just been very convenient for me as an empiricist-by-the-long-way-round, in the sense that the questions I was worried wouldn't find empirical validation, around homosexuality/gender identity, have generally (not universally) >
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ellie lockhart (she/they) @eleanor.lockhart.contact · 25/08/2026
and that wasn't nearly as clear that it would be the case in 2010, which is why when I studied the quant side of things I always mentally had a foot in the qual side because I really was worried about "what if the truths I uncover with numbers lead to bad places" & that wasn't based in *nothing*
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ellie lockhart (she/they) @eleanor.lockhart.contact · 25/08/2026
but at the same time, the current turn toward slopulism is *really bad* and the ways in which it's turning antisemitic (and honestly, anti-trans - a lot of the TERF stuff used to justify harmful laws is grounded in badly manipulated data) vindicates my old mentor's warnings about anti-empiricism
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flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Britain’s tiny gaggle of hooting mad elite cranks, who all know each other and relentlessly repeat each other’s idiotic bullshit, are of course not “victims of social contagion”.
The Times and Sunday Times • • 2h
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A disproportionate number of Gen Z females are affected by vague syndromes and may be victims of social contagion
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Pieter T. L. Beck @ptrbck.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
7. It was in this context she said that *if* department members thought they saw grounds for complaints, they should use existing procedures within the university and follow university regulations. Again with the emphasis not do to stupid things extra-institutionally
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