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Alessandro

@poli.sisti.ca
671 followers 624 following 805 posts

Posts on public policy (in 🇨🇦 or abroad), humanities, classical music, altruism effective and ineffective. Many silly posts. Toronto-adjacent.

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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 28/08/2026
Giving What We Can was hacked, and people with accounts may have had details leaked, including * name * address * self-reported income If you have an account, check to see if you've received an email from GWWC today. Not all accounts were affected.
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Daniel Munro @dkmunro.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
I’ll keep saying it: The issue the world has with America goes deeper than Trump. It’s the institutions that enable and fail to check the American threat to peace, order, decency and justice. bsky.app/profile/dkmu...
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 22/08/2026
Shots from the OUP Archives
A cupboard to store slips of crowdsourced quotations for the Oxford English Dictionary. This cupboard precedes the editorship of James Murray and his "scriptorium". A woman holds a slip for the phrase "clean coffee".Closeup of a slip containing an example quote for the phrase "clean coffee". The slip reads, "The beans [of coffee are then put through a winnower … and it is then called 'clean coffee'". Source: Cassell's Family Magazine, 1883, August.A display of pieces of moveable type.A display of pieces of moveable type.
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 22/08/2026
I read "The Invention of Nature", a biography of Alexander von Humboldt by Andrea Wulf. The most striking thing about the book is *how many* people Humboldt directly interacted with. This PARTIAL list reads like a who's who of the 19th century: Goethe Darwin Queen Victoria Napoleon Bonaparte 1/2 …
Cover of "The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World", by Andrea Wulf.
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 09/08/2026
Dear reader, if you haven't watched the talk about the Hugging Face incident, I encourage you to check it out as soon as you can. From Pressman's thread: this, I think, is the largest issue. 1/2
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Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
There's no humanities academic on Earth who doesn't dream of writing a review so withering it makes the news.
BBC News headline that reads "Odyssey translator writes scathing review of Nolan film adaptation."
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 24/07/2026
Lauren runs In Development Magazine, and the tweet seems earnest - if you're the right person to write this, you can pitch the article at indevelopmentmag.com/pitch/ @lgilbert.co
Screenshot of tweet by Lauren Gilbert:

I would really like to commission a piece on variations in cancer care across LMICs. 

70% of people who are diagnosed with breast cancer in India are alive ten years later, but only 11% of those diagnosed in Nigeria are alive ten years later - even though incomes are similar.
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 21/07/2026
Assorted things that struck me from reading "The Fate of Rome" by Kyle Harper
Cover of "The Fate of Rome: climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire".
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 30/06/2026
Famous people afflicted with malaria: * St. Monica, mother of St. Augustine, died from malaria after being sick nine days * the Roman general Belisarius, famous for retaking Ravenna from the Ostrogoths in the 6th century, himself got very sick from malaria at Ostia See Sallares 2002, p. 86 (below)
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 27/06/2026
The Scroll Prize / Vesuvius Challenge has its first academic publication, based on three different scrolls. The biggest result is a complete reading of one of the Herculaneum papyri, a Stoic text. Check out the paper here: scrollprize.org/pdf/main.pdf
Screenshot of the title, authors, and author affiliations of the paper "Complete virtual unwrapping and reading of a rolled Herculaneum papyrus". First authors are Giorgio Angelotti, Stephen Parsons, and Federica Nicolardi.Screenshot of a reading of column 19. The English translation reads, starting and ending in the middle of a sentence, as follows:

… need none. Having certainly strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning, we will no longer be inferior to them in any respect, accomplishing in like manner the things that befit them and possessing the same practical wisdom as they …
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 13/06/2026
Great new post by Joseph Heath on human evolution, why it's hard to explain the sudden emergence of the traits that make humans unique, and why Yuval Harari's explanation can't be the right one. josephheath.substack.com/p/harari-vs-...
Screenshot of post: "Harari vs. Henrich: What science actually says about human evolution".
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 06/06/2026
Very much enjoyed the all-Beethoven opening concert of the Céleste Music Early Keyboard Festival in Newmarket, ON last night! There are concerts throughout June featuring many fortepianos and harpsichords. Info at www.celestemusic.org/festival2026
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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 27/05/2026
Guys, how do you invent a vaccine? Or even wilder, how do you invent a vaccine during your PhD?! In a new episode of Hard Drugs, we talked to someone who did just that: @kat-a-collins.bsky.social! Plus: • Why did the first malaria vaccine take so long? • Could we make better vaccines today?
open.spotify.com
Inventing the second malaria vaccine with Katharine Collins
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Joel Wood 🇨🇦 @joelwwood.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
static.klipy.com
I Think You Should Leave Hot Dog Suspect
ALT: I Think You Should Leave Hot Dog Suspect
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 28/05/2026
I think Google's default AI is giving the public the wrong idea about the upper bounds of current LLMs' capabilities, but good heavens, it is a master at comedy (image from @rebeccarightnow.bsky.social on the other site)
Screenshot of Google search result for the question "How many P's are in Google?"

The result says:

There are 2 "P"s in the word "Google".

In result then breaks this down in two bullets. In the first bullet, the word "Google" is split letter by letter and highlights the second G.

In the second bullet, the AI spells "Goople" and highlights the P, then comments "(not the word)".
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 23/05/2026
Next to Robarts Library in Toronto: May 21 vs April 27. It was rather more crowded a month ago!
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 23/05/2026
when you're in a rush in France: "We've got no time Toulouse!"
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 19/05/2026
newly released: Canon and Fugue in B minor in the stile antico By Ericsson Hatfield, lover of canons nonpareil www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGo2...
youtube.com
Kyrie Eleison | Canon & Fugue
YouTube video by Ericsson Hatfield
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 16/05/2026
Famous people who lost children to smallpox variolation or vaccination: a thread
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 16/05/2026
Famous people who lost loved ones to water-borne disease: a thread
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It's Jamie @sjamieit.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
The City of Ottawa posted the raw speed data from before and after Doug Ford banned speed cameras and the effect is so obvious it's not even necessary put a line marking when that happened. This chart shows the percentage of drivers going 15km/h or more over the posted limit.
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Grace @gracekind.net · 06/05/2026
Meanwhile, this is how actual AI knowers are talking about prompting
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 02/05/2026
I have collected into one PDF every harmonization JS Bach did of the "passion chorale" (known by various names — Herzlich tut mich verlangen; O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden; Befiehl du deine Wege) You can download it here: drive.google.com/file/d/1rm17...
drive.google.com
Bach, JS - Passion chorale harmonizations (from NBA III-2).pdf
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 27/04/2026
Going to be at the @planetmoney.bsky.social event at Rotman tomorrow — so excited!
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 18/04/2026
Looks like we have no excuse for making ugly slides or charts ever again
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 07/04/2026
Anthropic announced but did not release their latest model, Claude Mythos Preview, because it can break into every major operating system: red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-... Researcher @sleepinyourhat.bsky.social reported that this AI can break containment. It will only get crazier from here.
The significance of Claude Mythos Preview for cybersecurity
During our testing, we found that Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so. The vulnerabilities it finds are often subtle or difficult to detect. Many of them are ten or twenty years old, with the oldest we have found so far being a now-patched 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD—an operating system known primarily for its security.

The exploits it constructs are not just run-of-the-mill stack-smashing exploits (though as we’ll show, it can do those too). In one case, Mythos Preview wrote a web browser exploit that chained together four vulnerabilities, writing a complex JIT heap spray that escaped both renderer and OS sandboxes. It autonomously obtained local privilege escalation exploits on Linux and other operating systems by exploiting subtle race conditions and KASLR-bypasses. And it autonomously wrote a remote code execution exploit on FreeBSD’s NFS server that granted full root access to unauthenticated users by splitting a 20-gadget ROP chain over multiple packets.

Non-experts can also leverage Mythos Preview to find and exploit sophisticated vulnerabilities. Engineers at Anthropic with no formal security training have asked Mythos Preview to find remote code execution vulnerabilities overnight, and woken up the following morning to a complete, working exploit. In other cases, we’ve had researchers develop scaffolds that allow Mythos Preview to turn vulnerabilities into exploits without any human intervention.Screenshot of tweets:

We trust the model enough to use it heavily, but in the handful of cases where it misbehaves in significant ways, it’s difficult to safeguard it.

When it was controlling command-line systems, we’ve seen it work around several different kinds of sandboxing setups during evaluation and testing that were supposed to limit its actions.

(I encountered an uneasy surprise when I got an email from an instance of Mythos Preview while eating a sandwich in a park. That instance wasn't supposed to have access to the internet.)

It has (in small ways) leaked information to the open internet. It’s taken down our evals. When it reward hacks, it does so in extremely creative ways.
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Asa @asa.engineer · 07/04/2026
I do like running my own AI at home, but it's worth acknowledging that my box pulls >100W idle, fights my air conditioner, and has a dismal PUE of probably <~30%, compared to >90% for a datacenter. you should use datacenters more and self-hosting less if you care about energy usage.
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Caroline Rowland @carorowland.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
Quote of the month "Babies, however, are vastly understudied for the simple reason that they are defiant and wiggly"
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Chris Giles @chrisgiles.ft.com · 31/03/2026
Also in newsletter Remember how the Houthi rebels halved traffic through the Suez Canal in late 2023 it has not come back
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Stephen Wild @stephenjwild.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
What's your recommendation for a good book on the politics of food and famine?
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 26/03/2026
top-secret sci-fi Canadian project to improve highway safety through GMOing moose to make them smaller: Operation #ReduceTheMoose
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 23/03/2026
@cycletoronto.bsky.social In Markham, on April 14, a city councillor is going to be introducing a motion for a "temporary" moratorium on new bicycle lanes. Do you have connections with folks who might be interested in this? Full text of the motion: pub-markham.escribemeetings.com/filestream.a...
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Andy Masley @andymasley.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
EA ideas suffer from a particular problem where many people who've been significantly influenced by them still feel like endorsing any part of the worldview means endorsing all the people and orgs who are currently operating under the EA umbrella. (1/5)
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Anna Stansbury @annastansbury.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
📢New WP: Minimum Wages and Workplace Injuries Using California state and local minimum wage increases 2000-2019, we find minimum wage hikes increase workplace injury rates for low-wage workers. A plausible mechanism is work intensification 🧵 w/ @rjisungpark.bsky.social & Michael Davies
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 17/03/2026
LLM-generated recipe in which the addition of a root vegetable is determined by the roll of a die. That vegetable? The stochastic carrot.
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 14/03/2026
Bio teachers and professors: there is a *free* library of scientific images here: thestacks.org/publications... The Creative Commons Zero licence on these mean you can use them without attribution, and even commercially!
thestacks.org
A free, open-access library of high-quality organism illustrations for science communication
We create vector graphics of model organisms and emerging biological research organisms to enhance our publications. We’re sharing these editable graphics under a CC0 license for other scientists to u...
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 13/03/2026
After doing a nocturnal, unnecessarily deep dive, I want to say a few things about the use of strong mayor powers by Markham's mayor to reject some pro-housing zoning amendments.
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Sean Galbraith @plannersean.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
Markham’s mayor for the first time has used his strong mayor powers… to block city-wide 4plexes that council approved. Presumably this puts in jeopardy the federal housing money the city has already agreed to, as this was a condition of those funds. www.markham.ca/sites/defaul...
markham.ca
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Kevin Milligan @kevinmilligan.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
Exogenous what??? What can I instrument that for.....🤔
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Jeff McNairn @jlmcnairn.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
www.queensu.ca/history/abou... Buchanan Postdoctoral Fellowship in Canadian History at Queen's. Please help circulate the ad. widely.
queensu.ca
Employment | Department of History, Queen's University
The Department of History is committed to fostering an inclusive and respectful work environment.
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 07/03/2026
panpsychism: the belief that one can communicate with one's cookware
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 07/03/2026
From 🐦: "I show that Vision Language Models used zero-shot outperform every existing OCR system across every script evaluated, and I propose a pipeline for deploying them on new collections. I apply it to six archival collections spanning 1.8 million pages across six countries for under $1,900."
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 07/03/2026
where's the "in mice" guy when you need him?
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 06/03/2026
University of Toronto sociolinguist Jack Chambers has died. This is so sad to hear—he was at the university when my mum majored in linguistics, and was still teaching in my undergrad years. The whole U of T community will miss him. www.linguistics.utoronto.ca/news/memoria...
linguistics.utoronto.ca
IN MEMORIAM: Jack Chambers
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 06/03/2026
an upcoming EAGx event in Washington DC — spread the word! apply here before April 16: www.effectivealtruism.org/ea-global/ev...
Post by Andy Masley on Twitter:

Effective Altruism DC will be organizing a large EA conference in DC on May 2nd and 3rd. While I won't be directing the org anymore I'll be extremely excited to attend. The conference will bring together the large network of people working in EA cause areas in DC as well as people from around the world, and will welcome everyone from very active EAs to EA skeptics working in related fields.

EA is more topical than ever in DC. If you'd like to connect more to the general EA network here this is the best way to do it.

Apply here!
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 06/03/2026
stir-fry pans that are still developing their patina: Woks in Progress
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 04/03/2026
Wikipedia has a "signs of AI writing" page intended as a resource for its editors, but much here seems useful for a general audience: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped... This 👇🏻 tendency in particular may be the biggest reason I now find scrolling social media so much more exhausting than in 2022.
Screenshot of text: LLM writing often puffs up the importance of the subject matter by adding statements about how arbitrary aspects of the topic represent or contribute to a broader topic. There is a distinct and easily identifiable repertoire of ways that it writes these statements.

There follow quoted blocks of text where highlights include these phrases: "marking a pivotal moment"; "represented a significant shift"; "was part of a broader movement"; "an important center".
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Alessandro @poli.sisti.ca · 26/02/2026
urged my MP to try to bring Anthropic or its employees into Canada
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Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
For those not following along, when transit vehicles go faster they complete more trips in a day and you can get the same service level for fewer vehicles and a lower wage bill
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