James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 29/05/2026so you didn’t realize @hypervisible.blacksky.app was being facetious. Got it! 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 28/05/2026sorry could you explain how this relates to the above post 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 15/04/2026We need to talk about the people who still think “AI will just go away”. 020
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 15/04/2026Even the pump-and-dumps never went away — they just got formalized into Gambling On Everything With Insider Trading Characteristics 010
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 15/04/2026Also, the latter assumption is often based on the fact the crypto bubble popped. But crypto’s still around and pouring billions into political lobbying. So even that assumption is based on a kind of lack of object permanence (‘if it’s not in front of me, it doesn’t exist’) 110
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 15/04/2026But this idea still kicking around that a bubble will pop and everything will just go back to the way it was? More than a little ridiculous. 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 15/04/2026It may just turn out long-term to be a cost centre under engineering rather than a core revenue engine, and, in the bearmost case, something only homebuild hackers, HNWs who pay corporate rates for personal access, and people in enterprise get regular access to. 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 15/04/2026The underlying tech is useful for a range of tasks, there are no easy substitutes for ‘context-aware natural language search’ or ‘synthetic text generation’, and they will continue to be used (like earlier gens of neural nets) for as long as the need exists and no better solutions are present. 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 15/04/2026And even should such a failure happen, the idea that the IP, talent, and assets *won’t* be acquired by another business with an established revenue engine who will continue R&D and commercial application (just with greater engineering and financial discipline) is downright silly. 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 15/04/2026Google, Microsoft, and Meta, like Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Bytedance, and High-Flyer, are still going to do LLMs even in the very unlikely event the upstart labs completely fail. 120
Reposted by James Rosen-Birchbree bird 🇨🇦 @goose.ski · 05/04/2026we made being a charlatan a viable career path — TV talking heads, opinion columnists; even journalism proper has become little more or less than industrialized charlatanism 631862
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 05/04/2026So the FT has this in-house data guy who makes a lot of shit up and vibe-stats his way to justifying his weird ideological whims most recently he wrote a piece on how AI would make everyone centrist I wrote about it, and for you methods nerds, you will never believe it unherd.com/newsroom/the...unherd.comThe FT’s AI optimism rests on shaky scienceLast weekend, the Financial Times published an article about the broader social impacts of AI. Studying, managing, and mitigating the negative impacts of the technological transition is supremely impo... 120
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 25/01/2026Great piece in FT on the crisis of humanitarianism. archive.is/OBSGtarchive.is 000
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 07/01/2026re: polls, this the most recent data from this summer 000
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 07/01/2026things have changed a lot recently, kevin. these were in our elite paper in the past couple days. 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 07/01/2026more importantly, there’s a deep conceit to dismissing an entire country’s growing concerns about threats to their sovereignty from an increasingly aggressive neighbour 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 07/01/2026like under what threat model is it not possible, DoD has been writing plans for decades on how they’d take every country on the planet 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 07/01/2026I think you have your head in the sand, assume there’s even remotely force parity, and assume the risk of a handful of Americans being captured in Canada is equivalent to senior Canadian staff being taken in the US. also, the moment troops start moving around it is way too late to do anything. 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 07/01/2026I also think where you see 4D chess and deliberate distraction, we see an extended effort to shift the overton window, normalize the possibility of seizing new territory, and warm the population to the prospect over time 010
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 07/01/2026I don’t think you grasp the seriousness here, or how little telegraphing matters, or how joint command makes Canadian officers easy to seize and capture 200
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 07/01/2026for us it was never about the imminence of an invasion so much as it was about the need to respond to a very significant change in US posture and global security architecture that could easily escalate to acting on stated claims, for which we need to massively alter our economy and society 120
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 07/01/2026I don’t think any targeted military action would involve conscripting academics, no 110
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 07/01/2026I am sure as an American it is very nice to be able to just say “nah he doesn’t mean it” but that’s just not a stance you can reasonably take when you’re on the receiving side 110
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 07/01/2026by the time there aren’t it will be too late to prepare, which is what we’re doing 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 07/01/2026we have substantive reason to be concerned up here, kevin 110
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 17/12/2025truly we have an object permanence problem 000
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 17/12/2025the crypto bubble taught a bunch of people that if they just plug their ears and yell ‘fake’ for long enough, things they don’t like will just go away (even if those things are still very much still around and the people behind it are funding a superpac of unprecedented size) 130
Reposted by James Rosen-BirchCarl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 15/12/2025Nature would do well to publish more content like this thoughtful piece from @kevinbaker.bsky.social and fewer Buzzfeed listicles gussied up as career advice "Five productivity hacks for using AI in your scientific workflow"artificialbureaucracy.substack.comContext Widowsor, of GPUs, LPUs, and Goal Displacement 512938
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 30/10/2025the most striking part is America is pursuing something whole-hog it hasn’t even clearly defined 000
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 30/10/2025at least Star Wars was deliberate in the 80s, but now? oof. 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 30/10/2025the fact China seems to have a much clearer idea of the state of AI and where present tech is on the innovation curve than their American counterparts (who are still wholly consumed by the hype machine) is profoundly concerning, even in the event they *are* a little behind 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 30/10/2025the cuts to basic research — including in science and engineering — in favour of going all-in on commercial R&D, will prove catastrophic once the limits of existing techniques make themselves clear, and no new foundational work is ready to bump up and take its place 110
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 30/10/2025Just heard that the main differentiator between the US and Chinese gov’t’s approaches to AI is that the US (and US defence establishment) want AGI and China wants AI 100% integrated across their economy by 2035. big AI’s marketing fantasy will have huge natsec implications 120
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 21/08/2025this then feeds back and further reduces the availability of capital needed to further drive advancement of the tech risking a winter 010
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 21/08/2025this has forced premature commercialization and therefore a direct market confrontation with the gap between the promise of the technology and its current capabilities and implementations causing the hype cycle to start to collapse 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 21/08/2025unfortunately, capital did not stay cheap tariffs, inflation, and broader uncertainty caused billions of dollars to evaporate overnight, and collapsed the risk appetite of investors in short, the bar needs to pay its rent, the tab is closing, and the bill is coming due 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 21/08/2025this created a gradual increase in innovation debt, but was tolerable as long as capital was cheap enough that companies could keep throwing engineers and resources at the problem and (hopefully) reach a breakthrough that would allow the gap to start closing 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 21/08/2025re: AI we are in a feedback loop where hype is used to attract capital (which is needed to further develop the tech), but each increase in hype raises expectations, growing the delta between current performance and market expectations 140
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 22/07/2025someone who self-presents as the national scion of the progressive movement and expressly has ambitions for the presidency has, completely by their own choice, expanded the scope of their image, mandate, and constituency beyond their district borders. that’s why you see this response. 000
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 22/07/2025I’m not the one freaking out at a politician being criticized, dude 100
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 22/07/2025the purpose of politicians in a representative democracy is to listen to constituents, aggregate their demands, and convert them into policy. unfortunately, we’re instead besieged by narcissists who believe the job is to echo lobbyists and condescend to constituents about how good they have it. 032
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 22/07/2025It’s profoundly disingenuous to say she’s the only target. 130
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 22/07/2025at least when she voted “present” on Iron Dome funding in 2021, she apologized to her angry constituents and committed to growth (crocodile tears notwithstanding). now it’s just belligerence. 160
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 22/07/2025the issue here is that AOC’s record on Palestine *does* speak for itself, and it doesn’t say what she wants it to. 2427
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 11/07/2025In just a few short years, we went from “Facebook for dogs” to “ethnic cleansing on the blockchain”. 080
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 26/06/2025new york times is gonna new york times 010
James Rosen-Birch @provisionalidea.bsky.social · 14/06/2025but did you see the systems diagrams on the screens behind them 000
