Finally, MIT Technology Review has called AGI what it is: a conspiracy theory. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/30/1127057/agi-conspiracy-theory-artifcial-general-intelligence/
Yet, just recently MS CEO Satya Nadella sounded still full of long-term ambition:
“I don’t think AGI as defined, at least by us in our contract, is ever going to be achieved anytime soon.”
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/812455/ai-industry-earnings-bubble-fomo-hype
Nelle maggiori città del mondo stanno aumentando sensibilmente le persone che usano le bici per spostarsi. Nonostante l’insofferenza degli automobilisti e le paure dei pedoni.
Saranno le bici a cambiare le ...
You have an PhD in #DigitalHumanities and have plans continuing research in this field? 6-years #PostDoc position #UniGraz in the Departement of Digital Humanities #DHGraz available! #jobs submission deadline: 8.12.2025 more info at https://jobs.uni-graz.at/en/jobs/20af80cd-d585-a918-51ad-67aa2a9b70c0
On 31 March 2026, University College London will be hosting a Festschrift Symposium for Professor M. Angela Sasse, to recognise and celebrate her contributions to the field of Computer Science and human-centred security specifically. We are seeking scientific contributions to a volume that will be presented at the event. Submissions will be selected by a committee of her students and colleagues, with accepted papers being made available online following the event.
Submissions are limited to eight pages in LNCS format, excluding bibliography and any appendices, and a maximum of ten pages total (shorter submissions are encouraged) on a topic inspired by, relating to, or commenting on the broad area of Professor Sasse’s research. The theme of the event will be “Users Are Not The Enemy”, but this should be interpreted as a springboard for ideas rather than as a constraint. The deadline for submissions is 31 December 2025.
For further details, including timelines and submission instructions, please see https://sassefest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/
@ucl
“We don’t need super intelligence to save us, because we’re already a superintelligent species. We just need to move from singularity to plurality.”
The plurality Tang speaks of is the cooperation between opposites: “Instead of treating conflict as a volcanic eruption that must be extinguished immediately, we should tap into that magma — that reactive energy that emerges from disagreement — to find solutions and build a kind of geothermal plant to resist the heat.”
That's an extremely clever idea: "she tries to reduce the time she spends online by keeping her screens in grayscale..."
The super-rich are not just overconsuming carbon, but also actively investing in and profiting from the most polluting corporations.
“The climate crisis is an inequality crisis. The very richest individuals in the world are funding and profiting from climate destruction, leaving the global majority to bear the fatal consequences of their unchecked power.”
via @oxfam
Thankfully, public pressure has once again pushed the EU Council to withdraw its dangerous plan to scan encrypted messages. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/once-again-chat-control-flails-after-strong-public-pressure
November 1, 1755, one of the most powerful earthquakes recorded in European history hits Lisbon. The earthquake was followed by a tsunami and a fire storm claiming an estimated 30.000 to 60.000 victims.
The Great Lisbon Earthquake did not only play an important role in the history of Lisbon, but also in the history of geoscience.
actual artist (not AI) created Portland frog prints & tees for sale 🐸 by Gwen Katz
Your #cyclingfallacy is…
“People should wear helmets when cycling, that would make it safe”
https://www.cyclingfallacies.org/en/people-should-wear-helmets-when-cycling.html
#cyclingfallacies #RoadSafety #helmet
#YesWeCasque #YesWeKask
French joke ☝️
🚨🚨🚨 Absolutely insane stuff here. @lorenzofb spent months working on this story.
Peter Williams, former L3Harris Trenchant boss — the division that makes cyber exploits, zero-days and spyware for Western governments — has pleaded guilty to selling Trenchant's exploits to Russia.
If you're a journalist writing about this Azure outage, don't forget to ask Microsoft how much of their code is "AI-generated".
Satya Nadella claims 30%:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-as-30percent-of-microsoft-code-is-written-by-ai.html
But an analysis of social media suggests something else. Many people and groups on the radical and far-right are harnessing a process known as audience capture in order to influence political policy.
A group of anonymous X accounts is said to follow a “posting-to-policy” strategy. These accounts – some of which are run by disaffected Westminster professionals – post to inject their grievances into online discourse.
To explore this dynamic, and how Reform’s recent u-turn has been shaped by it, we analysed the online networks that drove conversation about “mass deportations” on X over the past year. Using computational methods, we identified four distinct sub-communities defined by their retweet relationships. These sub-communities were formed around far-right influencers, radical right influencers, Advance UK/free-marketeer influencers – and around the Reform party.
Discussion of mass deportations in 2024 was almost exclusively dominated by the far-right and the anonymous accounts of the radical right. Fast forward to April 2025 and we find Lowe, Habib and a wider range of rightwing influencers have entered the conversation in support of the policy.
Finally, in September, following Reform’s August announcement, you can see Farage and key Reform personnel supplant the influencers as players in a movement they had little role in creating. In doing so, the party has aligned itself with a policy that less than a year ago it vehemently rejected.
A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then they discovered they don't exist | KQED https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/62750/a-group-of-scientists-set-out-to-study-quick-learners-then-they-discovered-they-dont-exist
Here's one very concrete bunch of adverse health effects of microplastics
https://www.sciencealert.com/microplastics-may-be-tied-to-vascular-dementia-cases-review-finds
Successful nonviolent movements for change require more than street protests. A human rights expert outlines 10 effective actions citizens can take: https://buff.ly/kpfD4ke
So, apparently Peter Thiel, who is obsessed with the antichrist, had never pondered how to respond if someone notices that he's behaving like one, or at least enabling one. Not exactly my idea of resilient thinker.
“You’re an investor in AI,” Douthat says. “You’re deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on. And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you are building… Isn’t that a concern? Wouldn’t that be the irony of history, that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?”
“Look, there are all these different scenarios,” Thiel sputtered, seemingly caught off guard by the question. “I obviously don’t think that that’s what I’m doing.”
https://futurism.com/future-society/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures
Studying how people interact, in the past (#CulturalAnalytics) and today (#EdTech #Crowdsourcing). Researcher at @IslabUnimi, University of Milan. Bulgarian activist for legal reform with @pravosadiezv. I use dedicated accounts for different languages.
My profile is searchable with https://www.tootfinder.ch/