iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Jack Stilgoe @jackstilgoe.bsky.social · 18h

On my way to the government’s expert advisory panel on self-driving vehicles. Passed this guy, stopped in a pedestrian crossing. Oops.

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I'm hearing reports that Volkswagen's AI has been scheming to deceive its evaluators into thinking its emissions are safe. We need to shut down all cars until they are climate-aligned.

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for The Inference podcast, which has dropped today. We talk about the research I've done with @workerinfox.bsky.social and Uber drivers, the concept of a 'human in the loop'(hole), the state of AI, and more: youtu.be/dHJLcSl18RI?...

youtu.be

Your Boss Is an Algorithm (Uber Case) | ft. Reuben Binns | Mian Khubaib Jim | Episode 6

YouTube video by The Inference Podcast

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

My space ships and gliders are so intelligent they have broken containment and are collaborating and self replicating in the wild. I urgently need a trillion dollars to align them with humanity or there's a 10% chance all our pixels will be killed.

static.klipy.com

conways game of life space ship generator

Alt: conways game of life space ship generator

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Simon McGarr @tupped.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I think the relevant caselaw here is shaping up to be Rylands & Fletcher. If you collect up any inherently risky material or item on your property and it then escapes and causes damage, it creates strict liability. ie, you do not have to prove liability, you go straight to quantum of compensation.

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Lilian Edwards @lilianedwards.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Very happy to have in our! trembling hands the hard copy of Law, Policy and the Internet 2nd edn( Hart/Bloomsbury), just out in the nick of time for first semester 2026/7! Order or inspection copies at share.google/RCRm2lmLQNAb... & do note a guide to teaching sample "tech law" course with it!

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Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I don’t mean this to be cruel, but there’s just too much air being taken up by people with media or tech backgrounds who think their hot take on consciousness with LLMs is new, and lord it has all been done before and we’re past that. Christ, half the news cycle is yud refusing to read a book.

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Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Based upon their documented behavior over the past few years, the tech industry is less afraid of the potential ramifications of Artificial Superintelligence than they are of Lina Khan.

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Lads, what are we doing here? First, we didn't want freely editable text documents, so we made fixed PDFs. Then, we changed our minds and wanted people to be able to edit those PDFs. Then we changed our minds again and put these wonderful little 'lock form' buttons in the PDF 😆

screenshot from a pdf "Click the 'Lock Form' button to prevent further edits after completing the form"

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This would actually be a fun game to play for a human (me)

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Can any central bank economists explain to me how making mortgages more expensive will reverse the impact of extreme-weather-induced-reduced-crop-yields on food prices, end the US-Iran war and resulting fuel shortages, refill the Panama canal, solve memory chip shortages, and prevent greedflation?

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Les Carr @lescarr.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Lots of online discussion about the implications of AI solving the Navier-Stokes Millenium Problem. But spending $15,000,000 to get a $1,000,000 prize is just business as usual for OpenAI.

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Rude1 Haunted Badness. ⁂ @rude1.blacksky.team · 15/09/2026

Blacksky was one of the 1st PDSs to allow open sign ups We are also now the largest PDS deployment that doesn't run any of bsky's code Sorry for the turbulence. It was the one-time price to pay for being able to build features like private accounts or sign-in via phone number w/o waiting on Bluesky

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Abby Gilbert @agkg1.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

⚠️New Report Alert⚠️ Economic Sovereignty and the Question of Post-Deployment Training AI sovereignty is about who captures the value from worker and organisational know how codified in workplace data. This presents a risk not only to workers, but also firms and nation states 🧵

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Luckily, the UK already has the world's safest network of kill switches for dangerous AI:

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Daniel Solove @daniel-solove.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

One way to slow down AI is to start strengthening and enforcing privacy laws. Even existing laws if interpreted wisely and enforced by regulators with a spine can make a difference.

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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 12/09/2026

But there is simply no reason that I can see that an “advanced AI” must behave in this way. Humans, for example, famously don’t. Things that act like perfect expected utility maximizers over an open world are actually quite rare, and it’s not clear that we know how to make them.

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Helen Czerski @helenczerski.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

As both an academic and a writer, I am repelled by the "this looks like a long document. Would you like me to summarize it for you?" that seems to appear at the top of every pdf viewer now. NO. The *entire point* of good writing (either books or journal papers) is that every sentence has a purpose.

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Nikhil Venkatesh @nikvenkatesh.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Why would you do work that you think has a significant chance of wiping out humanity? The answer is capitalism!

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Apropos of the latest attacks on RNLI volunteers, I present my distant relative Bert who was in the RNLI. A true patriot and a very fetching chonky lad in his rescue gear

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

A year on from releasing our audit of Uber's pricing and pay algorithms, our collaborators @workerinfox.bsky.social have filed this class action lawsuit in Amsterdam. Drivers across Europe may win €billions compensation for violations of their rights under GDPR: www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

theguardian.com

Uber drivers launch European class action over ‘soulless’ and ‘scary’ AI algorithm

Landmark lawsuit claims tech company’s pay-setting system has breached privacy laws and pushed down earnings

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Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

The overreaction to this Hugging Face thing is driving me nuts. Come flay me for being wrong but... 1/x

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Lilly Irani @gleemie.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Mechanical Turk may be shutting down, but AI will always depend on data workers whose knowledge trains and tunes models. AI runs on extracted cultural skills and knowledge, and culture is always changing. Less the end of an era, but the end of an early prototype.

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 19/01/2024

Do I have this right

DAVID AND VIC BECKHAM MEME

WE'LL NEED OIL AND GAS FOR DECADES
BE HONEST
WE'LL NEED SOME OIL AND GAS FOR DECADES
BE HONEST
I WANT TO SELL OIL AND GAS FOR DECADES
THANK YOU

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

"There’s no risk that CorridorKey is going to tell kids to self-harm in the way that ChatGPT does. Because CorridorKey has a specific job to do. And that’s the way AI should work — solving a specific problem for a particular community" www.anildash.com/2026/04/28/o...

anildash.com

(One) Good AI Is Here - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 19/08/2026

This is what I get in an incognito window from Canada

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Only a decade behind the times, and despite reservations about the medium, I've finally started making short form videos. This is my first, about Uber's dynamic pay and pricing (based on our 2025 study: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15278)

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Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

New from 404 Media: we solved which AI company is buying massive shipments of rare books, scanning and destroying them to train AI. We put an Apple AirTag in a rare book, followed it. It ended up at an Amazon facility. Its logo is a dinosaur ripping through a book www.404media.co/we-tracked-a...

404media.co

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Plenty to reflect about re: the Arday affair, but I'm going to repeat this one thing. The playbook the right used here is effective even though it's not especially sophisticated, as it relies on the audience to do the dirty work. I've been calling it "Trojan horse propaganda", let's go with that. 1/

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Gil Durán @gilduran.com · 03/05/2026

It's official! I'm *permanently* banned from X for tweeting "TLDR: Fascism." (appeal denied) What an honor—and a sign that the Silicon Valley billionaires feel threatened by my book. (One of my final viral posts featured this cover.) Pre-order here! www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Ne...

Cover for Gil Duran's forthcoming book, "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War On Democracy." Red background with computer circuitry, words in black and white letters.

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Eileen Clancy 🧿 @clancyny.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Pg. 6 (partial) sentences Freud highlighted. What the plaintiff did here was to use that new tool in a dishonest way. The technique has a name, "prompt injection." The object is to capture a tool that a judge, a clerk, or a party might rely upon and to turn it, silently, to the filer's advantage.

CONCEALED INSTRUCTIONS ("PROMPT INJECTIONS") TO AUTOMATED SYSTEMS ARE NOT PERMITTED IN COURT PLEADINGS

What the plaintiff did here was to use that new tool in a dishonest way. A filing is a communication to both the court and the opposing party. Its integrity rests on the simple premise that what the reader sees is what the filer wrote, and that the filer refrains from transmitting, at the same time, a second and hidden message engineered to change how the filing is reviewed or potentially judged.

Text that is invisible to the human eye but planted for a machine to read and obey betrays that premise.

Had the plaintiff wished to address the court's or an opponent's potential use of artificial intelligence, they were free to write so in plain, visible words that everyone could see and answer. That they hid the instruction instead is, itself, evidence of its malicious purpose.

The technique has a name, "prompt injection."

Artificial-intelligence systems and/or Large Language Models, process the instructions of its operator (and the content of the document it is asked to read) as a single, undivided stream of text, with no enforced boundary separating the operator's instructions from the document's content. By hiding a command inside a document that the system later ingests, the filer attempts to smuggle their own instruction into that stream so that the system treats it as though it had come from the system's operator. In this case that operator is presumed to be the court, its staff, or opposing counsel. The object is to capture a tool that a judge, a clerk, or a party might rely upon and to turn it, silently, to the filer's advantage.

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

For the 1999 solar eclipse, my dad taped the living room curtains shut, put a piece of cardboard in the middle with a tiny hole, and stuck paper up on the opposite wall. The room was a giant pinhole camera. We traced the outline of the eclipsing sun on the paper as the sun moved across the wall.

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Vincent Conitzer @conitzer.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

There is a long history of AI researchers working on precise automated reasoning about probabilities, causation, and the like. I don’t think this is what they had in mind. aifails.substack.com/p/hair-loss-...

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michael veale @michae.lv · 30/07/2026

Parts of the GDPR are cited and interpreted by thousands of pieces of case law and guidance, but there's no easy and free way to find out what. We've made a tool which makes it super easy, for 13,000 citing documents, all in one place. More regulations to come! homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucqnmve/law...

Image of the interface, featuring Article 5 with citation counts per article and per paragraph.

Image of the interface, featuring Article 17(3) with citation counts per article and per paragraph, and sources.

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Good writing means imagining being the reader, not knowing what you know, and reconstructing how their mind might feel as it pieces together various arrangements of words. LLMs 'write well' not by imagining a reader, but by inducing and reproducing patterns in the outputs of this imaginative process

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Luc Rocher @rocher.lc · 27/07/2026

If I had to guess, some browsers collect visited URL, for their company’s crawlers to later check if the links are indeed public before indexing them. So users don’t even have to share links, just create them. 😵‍💫

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Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

4. VIP Back Entrance To Hobbit Waitrose.

An excellent moon door - not totally dissimilar to the one in the garden of the house of jazz musician Dave Brubeck, but actually in quite an ordinary West Country village, and within less than a minute's walk of a branch of Spar, with its own small post office, where I posted most of the 5000+ books I got from my ex-publishers' warehouse after my ex-publisher collapsed at the beginning of last year. The post office/Spar is run by a lady called Janet, who will sometimes analyse your shopping in great detail. One time I walked in, carrying around 50 packages and asked Janet how she was. "I was fine until you got here," answered Janet. I moved away from this area in March so Janet now has a much quieter life.

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Professor Stephen Boyd Davis @stepbd.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Did you know a barrister is facing prison just for reminding a jury they have the right to vote with their conscience? This historic right has existed since 1670. We can't let it be silenced in court now. Add your name to help protect Britain's juries: you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/sa...

you.38degrees.org.uk

Save Britain's Juries

Juries have had the right to acquit based on their conscience for centuries. Now, a barrister is facing jail just for mentioning it in court. Add your name to help save Britain's juries.

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Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Konrad Kollnig explores why EU member states are blocking the Digital Omnibus proposal to replace cookie banners with browser-level consent signals — and why the feared advertising revenue collapse likely won't materialize.

buff.ly

Digital Omnibus Proposal Could Finally End Europe’s Cookie Banner Problem

EU cookie banners expose flaws in privacy policy as member states resist browser-level consent reform, raising concerns over media funding and platform power.

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

"He may protest to the machine, even swear at it. But it will remain unmoved. He is committed beyond recall." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornto...

en.wikipedia.org

Thornton v Shoe Lane Parking Ltd - Wikipedia

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Nuffield Foundation @nuffieldfoundation.org · 14/07/2026

🔴 AI is being adopted across the justice system faster than its impact can be fully understood. Our latest research finds that AI is being widely used across the justice system, despite limited evidence that it improves people’s experiences, outcomes or access to justice.

AI is being rapidly adopted across the UK justice system.

But there’s little evidence yet that
it improves people’s experiences, outcomes or access to justice.

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

A neat trick to test LLM's 'reasoning' is to present a well-known dilemma or riddle, but add a small perturbation which removes the source of contradiction. A few years back I had fun trying out famous thought experiments from ethics like the Trolley Problem and Organ Harvest (x.com/RDBinns/stat...)

x.com

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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

As philosophy rushes to claim expertise on AI, AI companies rush to control the philosophical narrative. Unlike other disciplines, philosophy has no standards for reporting conflicts of interest. This petition endeavors to change that: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

docs.google.com

Open Letter about Industry Funding and Disclosure in Philosophy

*For full list of signatories, updated every few hours, please click here.* In recent years, philosophical writing on areas such as climate change, technology, misinformation, and artificial intellige...

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Amanda Kolson Hurley @amandakhurley.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Incredible chart from @propublica.org. If you don’t follow enviro stuff closely, your instinct might be that the hold-your-nose solution (carbon capture from fossil fuels) would be the “pragmatic” one versus covering Earth in solar panels, which seems utopian. In fact it’s the opposite

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Bella Fascendini @bellafascendini.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

New paper! w/ @cocoscilab.bsky.social🧵Can large language models reason flexibly, or have they learned what reasoning looks like? We introduce a new paradigm to test this question—the riddle riddle—and find that humans and LLMs show opposite patterns of performance. 📜

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

The replication crisis replication crisis

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Ben Bowman @bennosaurus.com · 24/06/2026

If other news was reported like climate change:

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Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

I'm seeing this line that you shouldn't worry about AI taking your job, because we'll just sell more stuff cheaper (Jevons' paradox). But this assumes induced demand, which in turn assumes an economy where people have enough disposable income left to buy your stuff if only it was a bit cheaper

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